In the DHtech Code Review Working Group, the chance arose to have a piece of code reviewed that I created for a research project dealing with knowledge networks, i.e. multilayer networks of people, material objects and representations of semantic concepts that can describe the spread of knowledge. At that time the code was written for my own use and I only collaborated with other scientists on the output of the code, i.e. CSV files or visualizations of networks.

So having the actual code reviewed was on the one hand a bit scary since I had no experience with code review whatsoever, but on the other hand also absolutely necessary to judge the validity of it for the research questions at hand. What if I accidentally had some logical errors in the procedure which invalidated the results? Any comments from an external perspective could be really useful.

So I decided to submit the code for review (through this form) and waited for reviewers to take up the process. The Code Review Working Group had some useful instructions on how to start the process and proceed, which are now bundled at https://dhcodereview.github.io/. A few days later I checked the PR for the review and saw that the review was actually already done. I had simply forgotten to watch my own PR and was not notified of the comments. Something learned already. ;-)

Reading the comments lead to a kind of internal two- way communication in my case. For each comment, I had to get the idea behind the comment, compare it with my coding reasons, and then see if I would agree with the change or not. In the end, I changed the code where necessary and commented on the changes in the review.

Most of the comments were on improving the readability of the code and streamlining some procedures. In general I found the comments very useful and instructive for myself. With the focus on code quality, they definitely helped me get an outside perspective and thus hopefully helped to make the code more reusable. A detailed review of the algorithmical assumptions would have required more domain knowledge and time, and was thus out of scope, as the reviewer commented. Apart from my initial misunderstanding of the process of setting up notifications, the process was actually really quick and effective. So: 10/10 points, would do it again!