If you want to understand a new project, or grow your skills faster in a project your already working in, doing code reviews can be one of the fastest ways to improve your skills. Documentation is often suggested as a good starting point into a new code base, but I think for many folks reviews can provide a smoother on-ramp to a new open source project. Doing code reviews provides the opportunity to interact with people already familiar with the code base, ask questions, and provide pointers to active parts of development in the project.

Now jumping in and doing a code review in new project can be quite scary, even more so than submitting a pull request. In many projects (open source or otherwise) it is traditional that the more senior members of the project are largely responsible for code reviews, but you don’t need to be a senior person to have good input on a pull request.

Your knowledge of general style and good programming practices are useful regardless of language, and the newcomers eye is especially useful for finding parts of the code which may not make sense. Many of us have the experience of writing code which makes perfect sense to us, but after our first team mate takes a look it we realize how difficult to understand it can be, and regardless of open source or otherwise, just having a second set of eyes on a problem can be super useful. Even if you think you don’t have anything useful to contribute in the absolute worse case you can be a more interactive rubber duck (see rubber duck debugging).

Not only is this good for your personal growth, the open source community is in desperate need of more reviewers and maintainers. As amazing and fun as open source is most people in our communities wake up in the mornings (or get off work) excited to write code; less of us are excited about the idea of reviewing code. This can be seen in projects like Apache Spark with over 500 open pull requests, to smaller projects where the author has long since burnt out and isn’t around to review changes any more.

This talk will focus on what you can learn from doing open source code reviews, how to find good places to help reviewing, leaving effective and actionable comments, and include a live review of an open source PR picked by the audience. This talk isn’t just for folks getting started in a new project, often if you want to move up in a project you need to take on more reviews and these skills can come in handy.

Level up your skills with Open Source Code Reviews: a live review with Holden Karau