32
\$\begingroup\$

I was looking for posts about self-answering my own code review question, and I saw this post: Why should I be able to answer my own question in the question's editor on Code Review?

3 days ago I asked a code review on this site. I also sent my code to my friends, and they told me a great idea. They don't use CR.SE, so I thought I could post a self-answer about what they said, why is that important, why will it make the software better.

I've already changed my code, posting an aswer wouldn't help me, however, I think it may be useful for others, if they find my question, read the code and the answers.

So here is the question: do people read other questions and reviews just for themselves, to learn from reviews, other's mistakes? Do you come to this site from a Google search, just like how we find questions on SO and read the answers?

\$\endgroup\$
2
  • 7
    \$\begingroup\$ Personal anecdote: I recently started to learn C++. After reading through a brief hello world tutorial, the next thing I did was read the top voted C++ questions. I've found the advice presented there to be far more helpful than the tutorial! \$\endgroup\$
    – Gerrit0
    Jul 23, 2018 at 1:14
  • 5
    \$\begingroup\$ Not just learning from mistakes - often I'm reading answers to discover new ways for my code to express itself clearly. \$\endgroup\$
    – Toby Speight
    Jul 23, 2018 at 7:38

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
34
\$\begingroup\$

So as a mod I have access to some statistics on where traffic for our site comes from. A bit of this information can also be accessed by 25k users.

Let's have a bit of a look at some of that data.

In the last month, just below 2 million visits came from google alone. This is a whopping three orders of magnitude more than interlinkings between code review questions.

Similar metrics apply for interlinks from stackexchange.com, meta and interestingly The Workplace.

This is in and of itself not surprising. As a mod I can compare the numbers of visitors with the number of users that do things. And I'm somewhat pleased to see that there is around an order of magnitude more visitors that come to just read posts as opposed to users that interact with them.

I can also tell you that people don't just read one post and then never come back again. On average every visitor accounted for something between 30 and 60 visits in the last month. Do note that not every separate visitor must be a separate person. But that said:

This implies that Code Review consistently seems to provide value for people other than the people directly involved with a question :)

So I think we can safely say that people do read reviews, learning from other people's mistakes.

\$\endgroup\$
1
  • 12
    \$\begingroup\$ The last sentence is also the reason why it is so important to not change the code in question after it received answers. \$\endgroup\$
    – t3chb0t
    Jul 23, 2018 at 14:55
10
\$\begingroup\$

Yes: In fact, I am doing it right now. It is very useful to learn different viewpoints and ideas from other people.

\$\endgroup\$

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .