My answer to: “How can you effectively review code with complex database queries?”

I had a really interesting experience at a graduation day demo for a coding bootcamp. It cemented my strategy for reviewing someone else’s code:

My (non-programmer) business partner and I were walking past screen after screen, each showing another student’s source code. The class used a progamming language we didn’t know too well.

Most of the projects’ code looked impressive and very complex.

We couldn’t really understand how they worked from just looking at one page of code.

But one student’s code display was completely different.

We read it and totally understood what it was doing, even though we didn’t know the language. It made us feel smart. I remember that feeling. Well-written code makes your reviewer feel smart.

How did it do this? Clean Code. It’s both a coding style and an excellent book by Robert Martin. It changed the way I organize my code.