CodeTracer is a free peer to peer code review platform. So, if you have some piece of code and want some help on it then you should join this community where people can review your code and add comments to it. If you are an expert coder then you can be the reviewer and help others to improve their code quality. For people who want to learn a specific technology, it’s the perfect place to get started as you can search for code reviews on a number of different programming languages and review code submitted by others.
If you find any programming error or want to give any suggestions then you can insert inline comments and the code author will receive a comment notification. However, there is no option to mention anyone in the comments and no notification is sent when anyone comments on the code post. The interface is pretty straightforward and the code is displayed with proper syntax highlighting and indentation, as you can see in the screenshot below. In short, you will surely love to spend some time on CodeTracer :)
Also See: Free website to learn JavaScript programming, Search engine to find programming courses online.
How to use this peer to peer code review platform:
You will need to register on CodeTracer to get your code reviewed by other users already present on this peer to peer code review platform. Once you have registered yourself, click on the “</>Post Code” button on the top. This will open the code submission form, as you can see in the screenshot below. In a code submission form, you can submit at most 3 code files at once that can be of any programming language. In addition to this, you can also enter emails of your friends and other peers to join and review your code. Well, you can also choose to keep the code private, which can only be reviewed by people with whom you choose to share the code. If the email you specified is not on CodeTrace then he/she will have to first create an account before reviewing your code.
To post the code for review, you need to specify the title, tags i.e. languages used in the code files, and its description. You can also specify the review type to indicate the reviewers to check your code from a specific aspect. The review types are Syntax, Logic, and Code Standard.
As I mentioned, you can upload up to 3 code files to get them reviewed by your chosen peers or from the whole community. What I liked the most is that when you upload a code file, it is automatically parsed by CodeTracer and the code is displayed in the editing interface, as shown in the screenshot below. This allows you to edit the code files before making the submission as you can’t edit the code files afterwards.
Once you have submitted the code, it appears as per the set privacy level on the platform i.e. if its public then it appears on the main page where others can find it easily and if its private then the specified users will get a notification to review the code. The main feature right now is the inline comments that users can post on your code. While browsing your code when they hover the mouse on a particular line of code, then they will see a comment button. When they click on that button, they will see a Comment box where they can enter a comment regarding that particular line of code, as you can see in the screenshot below. You can also make the text in the comment bold, italic, strikethrough, and even specify code, preformatted text, and quote. Once done, a click on the Comment will post the comment and you will receive a notification about the same too. You can also comment on code post if you don’t want to make inline code comments.
You can follow the notification to follow up the comments. The line of code against which the comment was made is highlighted and you can view the comment by clicking on the button against it, as shown in the screenshot below.
Verdict:
That’s all about CodeTracer: a free peer to peer code review platform that can be used to get code reviews done or review code of others. The concept of the website is quite interesting and I think it is pretty good for both learners and experts in coding domain.
