Code Review Expectations

When I ask for a code review I sometimes ask myself if I took too long to build this piece of software and if the reviewer will suspect my work capability. I’m a very critical person so I expect just the best quality of my work and thus from others.

With that in mind I sometimes ask myself why others need an unreasonable amount of time until they are review-ready. I think the problem is that I forget, that the presented result is not the path it took to complete it. It needs some time to figure out how to solve a problem, learn a technique to perform a certain task or rebuild the whole thing because the first version didn’t worked out.

People that don’t value an ugly painting have the same problem. Sure, they don’t look nice and maybe don’t suit the personal style, but the painting represents not only the final state, it represents also the path until it was done. And we shouldn’t forget the artist itself. No one is like the other and that’s true for teir skills as well. Some are fast but sloppy, some are slow but genius and others are da Vinci’s.

So next time you get or give a code review, don’t judge the piece of software depending on the lines of code, the time it took to build or even worse the person who wrote it. Judge it as it is as honest as possible.