Question

I’m just now learning to programming at age 17. It’s hard for me to talk to other programmers as I’m just out of high school (which means I can’t take programming courses). I know that I write terrible code, and not like Jeff Atwood terrible code, my code actually sucks. So where can I post some of my code and get real programmers to review it. I know if I had a question I could ask it on StackOverflow, but I want to post a whole class and get a review on it.

The real problem here is that I’m not going to be writing the next great piece of Software. I’m going to be writing a really useless class, which will serve no other purpose than to teach me how to program. This code will never be used, ever! EVER! How can I get an advanced (or even intermediate) programmer to look at my code?

Thanks in advance! 😉

Answer 1

Look to the open source community. There are plenty of existing and new projects that would love an eager (if inexperienced) developer to offer support.

Going this route offers two advantages:

1. You get to see great code in action and learn from it
2. Any changes you submit will be reviewed by an experienced developer and they will often give you excellent suggestions as to how to improve your code before it will be accepted

Start by choosing a project in your language (there are a bunch in c++) and check out the code. You don’t need to understand it all, but you must be able to understand at least a portion of it.

If the project looks way to complicated, keep looking. Younger projects tend to have less code that you need to learn.