Post that PR

Sometimes you will be working on hairy and complicated feature in a shared repository. Maybe it's for work. Maybe it's an open source project.

As a responsible person, you are working on a branch. The usual way of working involves a lot of "intermediate" check-ins. Those serve, if nothing else, as a form of backup.

If you really enjoy backing up your code, you are probably already pushing to a remote branch on your source control server.

This is a great workflow. Responsible, safe, and resistant to local failures.

What could be better?

Well, it is often the case that people hesitate to open the pull request (or merge request, as known in some systems) before they are "ready". Time to post the PR, already!

If the PR is not ready, you can mark it as not ready for merging. Most modern systems allow an explicit flag to make pull requests as "draft". If nothing else, you can use a dedicated label like "do not merge".

There are a few benefits. One is that when your Continuous Integration system runs, this gives an obvious place to keep the results. This avoids the need to dig in the guts of the CI system to find the latest tests.

Speaking of digging through guts, most of these systems allow an easy search of "all my open PRs". This means that to find out the branches you have been working on, for example when getting back to the office from the weekend, you can just open the handy-dandy link and immediately see the list. (This list is also useful as "what do I need to clean up because it has become irrelevant.")

For some teams, this requires a culture adjustment. People need to allow for the code's state in their review, if they review at all. Ideally, this encourages the team to have a serious conversation on when code is reviewed, by whom, and according to what criteria.

After this conversation happens, and assuming people open PRs early in the process, magic starts happening. Because now, when needing localized feedback (for example, "am I using this function correctly") you can link to the right place in the PR and ask for specific feedback.

This feedback, given constructively and helpfully, allows the entire team to learn. Working in public, at least among your team, is helpful to everyone.

So don't delay, post the PR, and start working better with your colleagues.