After a decade of leading Java teams, I’ve learned that the moment a code review feels like an “attack,” the engineering process has already failed. As a seasoned guy, I approach every Pull Request with one mindset: We are all on…

As a seasoned Java engineer, I’ve realized that my time is the most expensive thing the company has. If I spend the next five years catching the same “N+1 query” or “Transaction” mistakes in every Pull Request, I have failed.…

One of the hardest lessons I learned in my years is that perfect code is a myth. When I was a mid-level dev, I wanted every Java class to be a masterpiece of design patterns. I would block PRs for days…

I have a simple rule: When I open a Pull Request, I imagine I’m the one getting paged at 3:00 AM because this specific code just crashed production. Junior devs review for Features (Does it work?). As a seasoned engineer, I review…

Most junior devs review code by checking if the logic “looks” right. They look at a for loop or an if statement and say, “Yeah, that works.” But in a complex Java system, the worst bugs aren’t in the math; they are in the state.…

If you open a Pull Request and immediately start looking at the .java files, you’re doing it wrong. You are looking at the “How” before you understand the “Why.”I’ve seen seniors approve beautiful, perfectly tested code that solved a problem…

If you are a Senior or Staff engineer and you’re still leaving comments like “you forgot a space here” or “use camelCase for this variable,” you are wasting everyone’s time—especially your own. Seriously. Stop doing it. I spent years being the “Code Police.” I…

In my early years as a Java developer, I thought a great code review was an interrogation. I looked for every missing Optional, argued over final keywords, and felt like a “guardian of quality” every time I left 50 comments on a Pull…