Saturday 4 May 2013

Code Review

G'day:
I became aware of Stack Exchange's Code Review website a few months back, but never really looked at it until today. I decided one way to get someone other than Bruce (no offence! ;-) to look at my PHP code would be to chuck it up there and see what happened. Well so far nothing has, but it's the weekend etc, so perhaps people have better things to do than review my code on the weekend. How this can be true I don't know, but the world is a funny place.

Anyway, they have a ColdFusion / CFML channel too, so it might be a place to chuck yer code up there to get reviewed.


At my work we have a fairly rigorous code review regime, and it's really benefited my code, both from the expected identification of cock-ups through to how to document the code better (or refactor it) to make it more understandable to others. I think code review is a great thing.

I've been speaking to Bruce (or browbeating him perhaps) a fair bit today, and he didn't know about the site. As he works by himself, I think he might be a prime candidate for sticking code up there in public to get help from other people reviewing it. And I know there's a bunch of other CF devs out there who work mostly in isolation, and it might be an idea for them too. It's tricky sometimes if people's code is under NDA, but I reckon that usually mostly applies to entire solutions, not individual methods / files / implementations etc.

Another one of my CF mates who I was speaking to today didn't know about this site either, so I decided to jot this article down as a heads-up to people.

Hopefully the moderation policy of a site like this might not be as draconian, counterproductive and mean-spirited as that on Stack Overflow itself... I will report back if I decide it's all a bit shit and perhaps not a good idea after all.

Anyone else use it, and have any observations to make?

Cheers.

--
Adam