Code review - a unique way of debugging
Namatuzio
Posted on September 15, 2023
How did you go about finding someone to work with?
A lot of students had posted around our Slack channel looking for help, which made it very easy to find someone looking for a code reviewer. I told one of my classmates I would look through his repo and ended up sending him mine through a DM.
What was it like testing and reviewing someone else's code? Did you run into any problems? Did anything surprise you?
It was very fun! It provided me with a lot of insight into the many ways a solution could've been built. It also made me realize I have some missing features in my release. I did run into a couple of problems, mainly in the functionality which I will get into later. The most surprising thing about the repo I reviewed was the complexity of the solution. It was very nicely crafted with a lot of techniques used and a variety of files that held either classes or helper functions.
What was it like having someone test and review your code? Were you surprised by anything?
I was surprised by how much I ended up overlooking. Obvious functionalities such as only utilizing text files went completely over my head but were found by my code reviewer, thankfully.
What kind of issues came up in your the testing and review? Discuss a few of them in detail.
There was a relatively large issue where single-file-translation was not working for me. I tried a lot of different things to get it to work on my machine but it didn't seem to work, what made it strange was that folder translations worked flawlessly. One smaller thing I found was that the student forgot to normalize text in the files so adding multiple new lines would add a blank
tag in the HTML conversion.
Provide links to issues you filed, and discuss what you found
As discussed previously, one of the main functionalities didn't seem to work and a smaller bug was present, another issue was that the README didn't feature any installation or usage processes at the time I reviewed the repo.
Link to reviewed repos' issues:
https://github.com/Amnish04/til-page-builder/issues
Provide links to issues that were filed on your repo, and what they were about
As I said earlier, I mistakenly forgot to include a couple of key things. Firstly I forgot to include some setup instructions within my README, but featured usage instructions. I also forgot to check for .txt files in the single conversion!
Link to my repos' issues:
https://github.com/Namatuzio/tiller/issues
Were you able to fix all your issues? What was that like?
I was able to fix most and know how to fix the rest, though I wasn't able to implement it in time due to time restraints with family events.
What did you learn through the process of doing the testing and reviewing?
I honestly learned a lot. I never knew having another set of eyes on a project would make it so much easier to debug code and create a stronger solution for a problem. It makes sense, but I'm amazed at how effective it is both for learning and building stronger code consistency.
Posted on September 15, 2023
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