Reviewing Beginners' C++ Code - Patrice Roy - CppCon 2022

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Reviewing Beginners' C++ Code - Patrice Roy - CppCon 2022

Beginner programmers require feedback. This includes both junior programmers and students who program, be they students in computer science, software engineering or other fields involving programming.

Providing this feedback can be tedious: it requires time and attention, and is difficult to do... but it's essential, and too often neglected.

This talk aims to examine the problem of reviewing code produced by beginners, particularly C++ code, including how to evaluate this code, ensuring fairness, and managing to do it within reasonable time constraints.
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Patrice Roy

Patrice Roy has been playing with C++ either professionally, for pleasure or (most of the time) both for almost 30 years. After a few years doing R&D and working on military flight simulators, he has moved on to academics and has been teaching computer science since 1998. Since 2005, he has been involved more specifically in helping graduate students and professionals from the fields of real-time systems and game programming develop the skills they need to face today’s challenges.

Patrice been a participating member in the ISO C++ Standards Committee since late 2014 and has been involved with the ISO Programming Language Vulnerabilities working group since late 2015. He has five kids, and his wife ensures their house is home to a continuously changing numbers of cats, dogs and other animals.
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#cppcon #programming #cpp

[victorbazarov]

We need reminders to be kind, constructive, efficient, effective, etc., in our reviews, so thank you Patrice for the talk. Many good points! Possible directions in which this can develop (maybe it's the next level of what folks already teach, maybe side courses) are the derivatives of this process. I see at least two: (a) teach how working on the code fits into production and maintenance (since you have experience with both) and how reviewing code is part of it that needs to be planned and scheduled, (b) teach how to teach/mentor (and this talk is a good start for the latter).

[LDiCesare]

Very good talk. I checked it to see if I could learn about doing code-review/helping people new in the company rather than as a teacher. I like the emphasis you put on not hurting people, using informal ways to get pass your message. And Smileys certainly can help, glad to see I may not be wrong in trying to put some in my messages/reviews.
Merci pour la présentation.

[goczt]

This guy wears all black, has long hair, writes cpp and growls naturally during a conference. So metal.

[franciscogerardohernandezr]

This is gold, I am porting my radio resource allocation system model from MATLAB to C++, so I wonder if you could eventually( there is no rush ) do the same thing with my cpp source code. I currently use Blaze, NAG libraries and vcpkg and I was expecting a much faster execution, but it turned out to be quite similar. Cheers and thanks for a wonderful presentation.