Online Peer Code Review? *

Question

For people who work on very small teams, or by themselves, or on teams where they are by far the best developer and have a need to learn from someone better than them, are there any online resources/methods for doing some sort of peer code review?

I used to be pretty active in the online art community (specifically drawing anime) and there were all sorts of sites where you could just post pictures for critiques and comments. I've never seen anything like that for programmers. I'm thinking of somewhere where you could post Object Architecture plans, DB design plans, or even just straight code for others to look at, learn from, and critique and comment on. Anyone know of anything like that anywhere (preferably focused towards PHP, but anything will do, and even a non-free site would be ok)?

note: yes, I am aware that this could have security implications, but security by obscurity is the worst security, and posting your code would actually help flush out potential security issues...

Answer

If you can't open source your project (the best way to do a massive distributed code review), there are a number of resources out there.

Here's an writeup about a tool called Rietveld authored by Guido van Rossum.

There is refactormycode.com which Jeff has used before in the Stackoverflow blog.

I found Code Collaborator by following ads from the Coding Horror but I have never tried it myself.

For django specific code, there is djangosnippets.org

But do consider that for your small team, especially if you are the most experienced developer in your group, in person code reviews are incredibly valuable, and when you use an automated approach you lose some of that value. The kinds of things you learn from in-person code reviews (tricks, techniques, elegant styles, different ways to solve a problem) may often be unrelated to the code you set out to review. In addition, everyone will learn something, not just the junior devs. If possible, I recommend you do in-person code reviews with your team.

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