There is a problem with code reviews. If you’ve worked in a professional setting, you’re probably all too familiar with them. Maybe you’ve read

The Problem with Code Reviews

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2021-09-08 13:00:06

There is a problem with code reviews. If you’ve worked in a professional setting, you’re probably all too familiar with them. Maybe you’ve read one of the many blogs and articles describing the benefits of code reviews. And you’ve most likely benefited from them, in one way or another.

Despite the overwhelming use of code reviews in the industry and the numerous articles about its benefits and best practices, why must I prepend the above statements with conditionals? It’s because code reviews are exclusive and despite the benefits being well known and documented[1][2][3], students, freelancers, new and solo developers are not able to use them. And it’s not because of difficulty. Code reviews are easy. Too easy some may say. Heck, you reading this article could even be considered a prose review!

It was only last year during an internship that I had my first run in with code reviews. Prior to then my code was…bad. It was written with a singular focus and objective in mind. Work. I knew nobody was going to read it (although this isn’t always true). Code quality? Readability? What are those? Are they tasty? Needless to say, after the internship it was as if I had opened my third eye. Going from vomiting code into my IDE for hours at a time and then -f pushing to master, to having to think about the length of my commits as well as the readability of my code was huge.

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