A great code review will challenge your assumptions and give you constructive feedback. For me, code reviews are an essential part in growing as a software engineer.

Writing code is an intimate process. Software engineers spend years learning the craft of software engineering and when something critical is said of our creation it’s hard not to take it personally. I find myself, at times, getting defensive when I hearing criticisms. I know the reviewer means well, but this isn’t always comforting. If it wasn’t for honest feedback from some exceptional software engineers, I wouldn’t be half the software engineer I am today.

Benefits of Code Reviews

1. Finding Bugs

Sometimes it’s the simple fact of reading the code that you find an error. Sometimes it’s the other developer who spots the error. Regardless, simply walking the code is enough to expose potential issues.

I think of my mistakes as the grindstone to my sword. To quote Michael Jordan:

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

2. Knowledge Transfer

Sharing your work with others is humbling. In many ways you are the code. I know that I feel vulnerable when I share my code.

This a great opportunity to learn from and to teach other engineers. In sharing your code you are taking the reviews on a journey, a journey into the code and aspects about you. A lot can be learned about you by how your write code.

At the end of the code review the reviewers should have a good understanding of how the code works, the rationale behind it and will have learned a little bit about you.

3. Improving the Health of the Code

As I mentioned, the more times you read the code the better code becomes. The more reviewers the better the chance one of them will suggest an improvement. Some might think skill level matters, it doesn’t. Less experienced software engineers don’t have the deep technological knowledge as experienced software engineers, but they also don’t have to wade through all the mental technical baggage to see opportunities for improvement.

Code reviews gives us the benefit of evaluating our code. There will always be something to change to make it just a little bit better.

Coding, in this way, is much like writing. For a good piece to come into focus the code must rest and be re-read. The more times you repeat this process the better the code will become.

In Closing

Some companies don’t officially do code reviews, that’s ok. Seek out other engineers. Most software engineer’s will be happy to take 10 to 15 minutes to look over your code.