by The Blog Team
Hi! My name is Julia, I’m a developer working at Codeminer42 and I’ve also been a part of the blog team for a little over 9 months now. I’ve mainly worked on post review where I make sure that every post is cohesive and doesn’t have any typos.
Since we’ve made some changes on how our internal process happens, we thought it was a good idea to write about how our flow works and how we communicate to try and keep a good frequency of posts being published.
Trello
Recently, we’ve adopted the Trello approach to try and minimize the ammout of constant communication needed between the team. Having our posts organized on Trello means that we only have to take a look at our board to check on how we’ve been doing.
Any developer inside Codeminer42 is allowed to make a post on our blog about whichever topic they wish no matter the expertise level, as long as it’s related to tech in some way. If you’re a Miner and you don’t know where to start, feel free to dm me anytime 🙂
Once an author moves their post to the pending review section or let’s us know they’re done working on it, a new trello card is created for that post. If nothing like the sort happens and we notice a post that appears to be finished, we’ll usually dm the author and ask them if the post is ready for review.
This is how our Trello is looking atm:
We also have a few labels to help us track how the post review is going:
- Published/Scheduled (Publicado/Agendado): This label is given to a card when it’s moved to our "Published" column, either if the post has been published or just scheduled to go up;
- Nontechnical (Não Técnico): If the post doesn’t have technical skills involved (much like this one you’re reading);
- Team Members Post (Post de Revisor): If a member of the blog team is working on a post, then that’s the label it’s given;
- Urgent (Urgente): Sometimes we might have a post that requires to be published with a certain urgency;
- Changes Required (Requer Mudanças): If the post needs too big of a change, then this label is slapped on that card and the responsibility to make those changes is given to the author;
- Awaiting for Authors Final Review (Aguardando Revisão Final do Autor): Once we finish our review, one final review from the author is required;
- Reviewed (Revisado): Kinda self-explanatory, means that the post was reviewed.
Team Communication
Before using Trello, our communication happened through a Discord group chat, posts to be review were pinned to our conversation and we never really knew who was reviewing what. If no one communicated, then we were completely lost on how the team was performing, and then, when we communicated the messages would end up getting lost between conversations.
On a team meeting, the Trello approach was suggested and ended up solving most of our issues. With the team being pretty small and having everything organized on a Trello board, there’s not really that much direct communication between teammates needed except on rare cases when there’s a piece of code written on a language that one of us doesn’t have that much knowledge on or when we’re too busy to review and we’ll ask another blog team member to take over for that week.
Communication with the Author
Once a post is picked to be reviewed, the reviewer in question will dm the author and let them know that their post is going to go through the review process. We tend to do that so that communication with them is stablished in case there’s any questions or changes to be requested.
Sometimes we hit a roadblock where we’re not sure if the author had trouble expressing what they meant or if it’s just a lack of knowlege on our part so, that usually implies on us asking the author for a little bit of clarification on what they wanted to say and we try and reach an agreement on how that could be written in a clearer or simpler way.
Once the review process is done, it’s up to the author to give the final approve so that we can schedule the post to go up.
Review Process
So, the way our review process starts is: once we have a little bit of free time, we’ll take a look around our Trello board and the posts being worked on the blog, the priority is to review the older ones that were finished.
I’ll be talking on how I personally go about it from now on.
By grabbing a post to review, I’ll update it’s status accordingly on Trello, open communication with the author and start working on it. I’ll start by looking for typos, check for verbs being properly used, I’ll read sentences and make sure that they’re making sense and are clear on getting the information across to the reader. We’ll try and not alter too much of the original text, if we do change something we make sure to keep the original idea behind it and if any big changes are needed, then that responsibility is passed on over to the author.
We may use Grammarly to assist with the review sometimes.
Once I’m done with that first sweep, I’ll read the post again looking for something that I might have missed and to get a general idea of how the post as a whole is flowing, if I’m content with what we have then I’ll dm the author to get his final review.
Upon being blessed with the authors approval, we’ll schedule the post to go up on the next available Wednesday – the intended post output is 1 per week, and then it will be shared on all of Codeminer42’s social media and our internal Discord server.
That’s all folks!
Thank you for reading, hope this post made it clear how our review process works and that it also helps my fellow co-workers to not get too anxious when their post doesn’t seem to be reviewed as quickly as they wanted it to, sometimes we have a few posts that are older and therefore are higher priority.
See you next time! 🙂
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