In a new tongue-in-cheek (humor) post to his site, Tomas Votruba shows you how to criticize like a senior programmer when offering feedback on code errors or architecture decisions.

As I spend most of my socials online time on Github and PHP-related discussion, I've noticed many people do so many wrong things while giving critics. I want to correct this once and for all, so I've prepared a guide for you.

His recommendations (again, the opposite of what is actually useful) include and eight step process to find a bug, never reversing your stance, repeating the same comments over and over and always telling, never asking. Following this list of "not to dos" he also includes a list of "to dos" correcting the misconceptions. This list includes:

• asking if feedback is desired
• determining your motivation for the feedback
• replacing "you" with "I"

In each recommendation there's examples of phrasing and comments that give you some guidance on how you can be more effective at giving feedback on projects and code.