Code Review Walkthrough

Mike Conley and I had lunch yesterday with SmartBear’s Gregg Sporar to talk about code review. (We ate at E Pan on Spadina Avenue, which isn’t particularly relevant, but the crispy chicken with orange peel and the baby bok choi in garlic sauce were both delicious.) One of the things that came up was the dearth of accessible examples of code review that instructors (like me) can put in front of undergrad students. The key word here is “accessible”: hundreds of thousands of reviews of patches to various open source projects are freely available on the web, but most require too much background knowledge to be usable in a classroom setting.

A couple of years ago, I posted a transcript of my review of a Markdown wiki text processor written in Python. Mike has just pointed me at Brandon Savage’s multi-part review of some Twitter processing code in PHP. If you know of other examples like this, we’d welcome pointers. If you don’t, but would be willing to create some, please let me know.