Naturally; if self-review were as effective as peer-review, we need not do the latter! The implication here seems to be that one is only likely to be able to s

Naturally; if self-review were as effective as peer-review, we need not do the latter! The implication here seems to be that one is only likely to be able to see 'trivial' mistakes in one's own work; that, unfortunately, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophesy, as, if you are focusing on issues like syntax, you are probably not giving so much attention to more analytic issues such as what implicit assumptions need to hold for the code to work. One thing, that is not uncommon in my experience, is for the early part of your work to be predicated on assumptions about what the as-yet unwritten parts will need or do, and some of these assumptions turn out to be wrong. There is some hope that, on revisiting the early work with an analytic eye, after completion if the remainder, you will see this to be so. There are a couple of things that helped me improve how well I review my own work, both mentioned in the article: take a break between writing and reviewing, and don't make excuses (to yourself or publicly) or otherwise minimize problems found by the reviewer (the same goes for anything you found in testing.)