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Ask HN: Paid code review services for solo developers?

16 points by modernerd ↗ HN
In the literary world, there's a bustling industry of freelance editors who charge a per-word fee to read your manuscript and suggest improvements. What's the equivalent of this for programmers?

I'm a self-taught, lone developer working in a range of languages. (PHP, Python, Ruby, and Objective-C.) I'd like to be able to submit my code to a person or small team with more experience than me, then receive suggestions both to improve it and to read up on subjects that might improve my code in the future. Ideally, I'd like this to be a mentoring-style relationship that results in my code quality gradually improving over time, but at a faster rate than I could accomplish alone.

To date, I have found several companies who offer code review services to large organisations for the purpose of security and performance audits. I have also found websites that offer feedback for small, specific snippets (e.g. http://codereview.stackexchange.com/ ). But I haven't found any services aimed at reviewing whole projects to help and educate programmers with a genuine interest in improving their own abilities.

Has anyone else come across such a thing? If no such service exists, what options are there for peer review when you're not working in an environment with other developers?

12 comments

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webbruce
I would probably use this too...for security and optimization.
tocomment
You could probably ask somewhere like StackOverflow* too. A lot of people there are happy to help out. Or a mailing list for whichever language you're writing in.

* Warning: Your question will probably get closed on second thought ...

JoachimSchipper
You could also try to find someone in the same boat and trade reviews - a mentor is great, but code reviews by a peer are also extremely useful.
jkaykin
I had an idea to build something like this where expert programmers will be ready to chat with people who needed code review or help with their code. Stack Overflow is nice but many programmers don't have time to wait and don't want to scour Google, they want to get the answer quickly
HedgeMage
I've always just traded favors with more experienced coders for this kind of thing. I'm the sort of person who always jumps in when somebody needs a favor, so I inevitably have people I can turn to when I need one.

Best day ever (well two best days, it's happened twice): the first time someone whom I considered a much better coder than I came to me for a code review.

arvcpl
Find a friend who has his brains tuned for systems architecture & design :) Overall you do not need that much reviewing. The biggest issues appears IMO when there are mistakes in high level architecture and those can be spoted by someone with right experiene really fast and while refactoring and restructuring code you will become way better developer.