Has anyone experience with officehours.io? I like the concept and it sounds like something HN would typically be interested in but all previous posts about them didn't get any traction.
Officehours hasn’t seen a lot of traction. That said, it’s still running, and has some activity.
To our surprise, the biggest problem is in getting requests for advisors’ time. Turns out many will share their experience; fewer feel comfortable asking for it.
Go to Github and look at projects where there have been a few recent merged pull requests. Look at listed issues, the TODO file and so forth. Fix an issue and send a pull request.
After a few such patches, this will start getting you code reviews. People have much more time to review your patches to their code than they do to make suggested patches to your code.
Adding on - look at recently closed PRs and see if they get reviews like you're looking for. If not - keep looking until you find a project at the intersection of your skills and desire for feedback. This will take a fair bit of work, but it's worth it.
And of course - don't take things too personally, but also don't take them too seriously either. Plenty of open source projects have drive-by "code reviewers" that nitpick everything without contributing themselves. All things in moderation
Well let's say you know Kotlin well and program for the Android platform a lot. You can search Github for projects using the Kotlin language which contain the word Android, with the most stars like this:
We go down six and see Google's android architecture components. We click on it and click on pull requests. We look at what is open and what is closed.
We see a month ago someone sent a pull request which was merged -
If we go back more we can see other merged requests in the recent past.
This is a project with a "few recent merged pull requests". People sent a patch to the code in a pull request, and their branch was merged into the main code base.
While this example was Android and Kotlin, you can look at other languages you have more familiarity with, and other focuses. Projects with a lot of stars and/or forks are good candidates to look at, and you can sort by them. I did add the caveat recent though, as sometimes a project has been abandoned for a year or more, and there might be no active project owner to merge pull requests.
I’d also highly recommend to share a link to your code now. You’re top on hn/ask, you’ll get quite some folks looking at it and maybe someone is interested in helping you out.
It is difficult to get code reviews without working on a full-time job. I would suggest to read Pragmatic Programmer. It has some nice wisdom on how to write elegant code.
I do that! I specialize in reviewing and auditing delivered work for entrepreneurs/investors/etc, which is a slightly different perspective than code reviews for developers themselves, but depending on your project and needs I can do that too.
I also offer ongoing mentoring for independent freelancers, if that's the track your on.
How is this going to help though? If you are starting out and have a few test projects on github it doesn’t really happen that random people discover them and do a code review. It barely happens with bigger open source projects.
If you're ok to pay some money, try codementor.io. If you're stuck on some weird problem in a new language/framework that you're not able to google out of, you can hire some mentor there.
You can send me an email. I have 3 years of experience developing large scale as well as performant software, including work experience at two YC startups.
Mail: abhikandoi2000@gmail.com
Note: This opportunity window is only open for a short period before I start something else. Post which it will become less likely for me to respond frequently.
