I am a good programmer, or so I thought before. I always love to program. And I want to learn many things about programming to make me a better programmer. I studied programming for 1 year and now I am working as a programmer for almost 2 years. So in short, I have almost 3 years programming experience.

Our team is composed of 5 programmers, and 4 of us are new, 1 has more than 3 year experience. We've been working for a program for almost a year now and nobody ever review my code and I was given a page to work with. We never had a code review and we are all new so we don't know what is a clean code looks like. I think programmers learn by themselves?

We deployed our program to the program without thorough testing. Now it is tight and we need an approval and code review first before we make changes with the code. For the first time, someone reviews my code and he says it is a mess.

I feel so sad and hurt. I really love programming and making them say something like that really hurts me. I really want to improve myself. But it seems like I'm not a genius programmer like in the movies. Can you give me advise on how to be better? Have you ever experience something criticizing your code and you feel really hurt? What do you do on those events.

The truth is that probably in 2 years when you will see your current code you will agree that it was a mess. Learning programming is a never ending process and there will always be someone who is better at it than you.

So if person who said that your code is a mess is not just mean and it is not another case of "I would do it better" disease common among programmers you should ask him/her what exactly is wrong with your code and how can you improve it.
