This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Aubrey D
Today, I had my first experience conducting a review of someone else’s open source project. I chose to review repo-snapshot,(https://github.com/slyang08/repo-snapshot) a CLI tool that packages repository structure and file contents into a readable text format. This turned out to be quite an educational journey with several unexpected discoveries.
I decided to take a synchronous approach to the code review, working through different aspects systematically rather than doing everything in parallel. My process included checking the license compliance first, then examining the documentation, followed by functional testing, and finally diving into code quality issues.
I prefer the synchronous approach because it allows me to immediately spot connections between different problems. For example, when I found license inconsistencies in the package.json,(https://github.com/slyang08/repo-snapshot/issues/2) I could immediately cross-reference it with the LICENSE file and README documentation. This interconnected discovery process wouldn’t have been as effective with an async approach where I might miss these relationships.
Testing someone else’s code was eye-opening, especially when things didn’t work as expected right from the start. The very first step – following the installation instructions in the README – failed immediately. The documentation instructed me to run pnpm install and pnpm build, but I got a “command not found” error because pnpm wasn’t installed on my system.
This was my first surprise: the README assumed users already had pnpm installed, without explaining how to get it. Unlike npm which comes with Node.js, pnpm requires separate installation. This created an immediate barrier for new users trying to use the tool. (https://github.com/slyang08/repo-snapshot/issues/4)
During the code review process, I also received feedback on my own project. The error handling improvements required more thought and testing. I had to consider various edge cases that I hadn’t originally anticipated, such as symbolic links, permission-denied scenarios, and handling very large files. This reminded me that robust software needs to gracefully handle unexpected situations, not just the happy path.
Conducting this review made me much more conscious of these issues in my own projects. It’s easy to focus on getting the code working while overlooking the user experience, documentation quality, and legal compliance. The experience reinforced that good open source projects require attention to many details beyond just functional code.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Aubrey D