What I look for in a codebase in the first hour
A checklist for assessing an unfamiliar codebase quickly — for a job, a due diligence, or a project you inherited.
#code-review
5 pieces tagged code-review,
from October 2, 2025 to July 24, 2026.
Code review comments that change things
Most review comments are noise or nitpicks. A small taxonomy of the ones that are worth writing.
Naming things: the actual rules
It is one of the two hard problems and it is treated as a matter of taste. It isn't. Here are the rules that hold.
Reading code is a skill and nobody teaches it
We spend years learning to write and approximately zero hours learning to read. Then we spend our careers reading.
The pull request is the wrong unit of review
It was designed for occasional contributions from strangers. We use it for everything, including code a machine wrote.