I’ve been thinking about code reviews a lot lately.
My mom has often worked as an editor, and she once told me of the most difficult thing about being an editor (I paraphrase):
You have to let the writer keep his or her style. The challenge is to improve the writing without making it seem like you wrote it.
Working as a technical writer and as an English teacher, I thought about these things a lot. I would often think, “that is not a sentence that I would have written, but it is clear. It works.” Sometimes I would read a sentence and think, “I don’t know what that meant; that sentence doesn’t work.” I would change the sentence in the second situation but not the first. Continue reading “Throwing Darts at Code” →