Ask a programmer to review 10 lines of code, he’ll find 10 issues. Ask him to do 500 lines and he’ll say it looks good. - @girayozil
Code review is a really subjective thing where each team or even individual runs things very differently. However, a bad code review process can lead to bad code smells and unnecessary tech debt (just ask all the vibe coders out there 🫣). I will try my best to share my rather opinionated takes while explaining the reasoning behind each of them.
This is part of a series (The Opinionated Engineer) where I share my strong opinions on engineering practices.
Overly prescriptive formatters
I’m highly supportive of having a preset of an overly prescriptive formatter. It doesn’t matter if it’s spaces vs tabs, 2 spaces vs 4 spaces, curly braces on the same line or newline; as long as you have a formatter that keeps it consistent. This cuts down on all the unnecessary time reviewing and fixing code formatting while still being easy to read and scan through. Make them as strict as possible, ideally 100% reproducible where every line of code only has one way it can be formatted. Again, it doesn’t matter which style you pick but just pick something and stick with it, it’s all about consistency here.