How to Review Code as a Junior Developer

I first started as a Software Engineer at Pinterest on the Shopping Partner Experience team right out of college. I focused on my personal learning by reading documentation and technical design documents to understand my team’s systems and projects, but I lacked the confidence to review my teammates’ code. Why would the senior engineers want to have a junior engineer review their code? What if I said something that was just flat out wrong?

My focus on learning was great at the beginning, but at some point in my first year, I realized something critical: I needed to help the entire team, not just myself, in order to grow to the next engineering level. To start, one of my teammates recommended I review code.

The advice was simple enough — use code reviews as a way to learn more about a piece of code and expand my knowledge of our overall system. It turned out code reviews were the perfect way for me to continue my learning journey.

Beyond reading more code and reading other great engineers’ code, reviewing code also gives a hint of who to ask if you have any questions about a given section of the code. Through code review, you can keep an eye on who knows that portion of the system well and might be a good resource for you down the road. At one point, I was investigating a bug in a part of our system that was new to me. I got stuck and didn’t know how to continue investigating it, but because I had watched who on my team was working on this section of the code (and who was solving bugs in this area), I knew who had the knowledge to help guide my investigation. I reached out to that engineer and, with their help, was able to find the root cause of the bug.

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