How do you actually get better at code reviews?

[Egglex]

I've been doing regular code reviews at work for a while now, but I don't feel like I'm improving much. Most pull requests are pretty straightforward, so I rarely come across anything challenging. How do you practice reviewing code outside of work? Are there any good resources or platforms with realistic examples?

 

[Lovol]

The gap between being able to review code and actually being good at it comes down to the variety of problems you've seen before. Standard workplace PRs tend to cluster around the same patterns, same tech stack, same team habits, same kinds of mistakes. The people who get sharp at this usually dig into open source pull requests on GitHub, especially in repos where active maintainers leave detailed comments on decisions. What you pick up from seeing how experienced engineers push back on certain choices or catch subtle edge cases is something routine workplace reviews just don't provide.

 

[Thirteenth]

The problem with code review as a skill is that most feedback happens weeks after the PR merged, if it happens at all. By that point nobody's going back to revisit why a certain approach was wrong or what a better solution would have looked like. There are tools built to give you that feedback loop in a more structured way. Run through interactive code review exercises here https://codereviewlab.com/challenges . The scenarios cover security issues, logic errors, and design problems you'd rarely come across in a normal sprint. A lot more informative than waiting around for a tricky PR to land.