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Comment by luu | Hacker News Reader

Steps 1-3 and 5-6 are "easy", but how do you step 4?

4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses

It would be great if my company did code reviews on everything a la Google, but that’s not going to happen any time soon. I code in my spare time, but what expert is going to want to check out my spare time projects, project euler solutions, or what have you, and give feedback? So, how do I go about getting expert feedback?

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Join an open source project? Find someone at work that's willing to do reviews for you if you do them for him? (slow-motion pair programming, kind of). Read code written by your company's best programmers and compare what they did with how you would have done it?

I think you might be surprised. I'm not sure where you'd go to find these people, however. Is there something like stackoverflow for code reviews? I just posted a related Ask HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632965

but sadly got no responses. I just procrastinated half an hour reading HN. I probably would have preferred to review some young, eager programmer's code.

It is as hard to find great students as it is to find great masters.

Yes, as the Asian proverb goes:

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."

You need to get involved with the right communities, I think, and reach out to mentors.

At my company we have a mentor/mentee system in place, where you can get advice from others in the company that aren't necessarily in your discipline or product group. To be honest, I haven't found a ton of value in it, but I have found that others in my group are more than suitable mentors for me.

You could always try setting up something like that where you work (or informally ask around for a potential mentor). In fact, an external site that paired up mentors/mentees together could be quite valuable.

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