How can feedback help you understand your coding strengths and weaknesses?

Feedback is crucial for understanding coding strengths and weaknesses, identifying areas for improvement, and building on strengths. It helps learn from mistakes, enhances confidence, and aligns goals with client expectations. To incorporate feedback into programming skills development, take notes, ask clarifying questions, analyze objectively, and create an action plan. Both positive and negative feedback guide professional growth.

At some point, you, as a developer, might lose interest or feel stuck. Reading the best practices might be too general, and it is unclear why it is practical. Here, feedback is a tool that clarifies why it is essential and where to look for improvements. It defines direction and awakens interest in reading professional literature and examining the subject with others.

In addition to code review, I would use two other methods. First is pair programming, where the feedback is fast and discussable. You could even search for the answer together. The second is getting feedback from a new team member or a junior developer. It is ideal to test your code by going through it with them or, even better, by reviewing their pull requests. This way, you can notice their struggles and ask what difficulties they met and where.

If you are not comfortable asking for feedback you can utilise AI to help review your code. Even chatGPT is pretty good at suggesting improvements to functions and features that you have built. Understand what has been suggested and whether it is actually an improvement on your version.

Accept that there is always more to learn and that developers with greater experience have probably already solved the issues you are having many times over. You can learn so much just by seeing how experienced developers solve problems.

One good way of giving feedback is via Code Review. Usually my team performs code reviews every sprint and once in a sprint whatever user story gets developed and pushed via merge request is at-least reviewed by two other developers. When we collaborate in a code review meeting it not only improves code quality but also help us know various other coding techniques followed by reviewers. It helps in understanding our coding strengths and weaknesses quickly

Feedback in coding shows where you're doing well (clear solutions, tidy code) and where you can improve (messy code, weak algorithms). It helps you grow by highlighting strengths and pointing out areas that need work, making you a better coder overall.

Every feedback has to be analyzed before following it. The goal is to build a guide for yourself and your future mentees that is reusable through these stages: - Ask yourself: "Do I understand why writing a code this way is valuable?" if not, return it to the reviewer for further clarification. - Then, ask the same question but another developer(s). This way, you might notice the difference in styles and philosophies. So, collect opinions to see a more complete picture. - Now that you know why, question when this practice is not helpful or can be excessive - Then, search for alternative strategies and try to compare them. - Finally, decide what you would like to try this time and experiment.

Don't take constructive criticism personally, if the feedback is good then you are learning something useful to progress as a programmer.