How I Review Code: 12 Specific Patterns I Look For
Code review without a checklist is a vibes-based meeting. Here's the 12-item checklist I run on every PR — patterns that catch real bugs before they ship.
Cornerstone essays. Read once a year.
Code review without a checklist is a vibes-based meeting. Here's the 12-item checklist I run on every PR — patterns that catch real bugs before they ship.
The repo strategy debate is a proxy for real questions about ownership, dependency management, and CI cost. Frame those directly and the repo layout falls out.
Python rewards depth. These five features stayed hidden from me longer than they should have — each one collapses code that I used to write the long way.
strict turns on eight separate checks. Each catches a different category of bug. Knowing which is which makes you better at picking which to enable mid-migration.
Most slow Postgres queries are fixed by one of four index types. Master those and you'll handle 80% of perf work without touching the planner.
Scaling Git workflows is mostly about adding ceremony as your blast radius grows. Solo dev: just commit. Team of 5: PRs + main. Team of 50: protected branches + reviewers + release branches.
Type-driven development means making invalid states unrepresentable. The types refuse to compile when you do something wrong. The result: less code, fewer tests, more confidence.
ORMs solve a problem most apps don't have. Plain SQL with a thin query builder beats Prisma/SQLAlchemy/Sequelize for most production workloads. But there's a real case where ORMs win.
Hype cycles aside, the stack that gets product to users in 2026 is the same one that worked in 2022 — only the version numbers changed. Postgres, Next.js, TypeScript, Cloudflare. Boring is a feature.
Source code is the highest-density learning material in our field, and almost nobody teaches you to read it. Here's the technique that turns 'overwhelming' into 'tractable.'