Best Practices: Checklist to Become a Good Senior Dev

Before finishing any task (5–15 min max)

• Add a comment explaining a non-obvious decision or “why”
• Clarify or improve an error message
• Extract a magic number into a named constant
• Add type hints to function signatures
• Add a log statement that would speed up future debugging
• Fix a flaky test if you spot one
• Update the README with something that confused you
• Extract repeated logic into a shared/reusable module
• Add examples or error cases to API/function docs
• Document a deployment or config gotcha

The 5 questions to ask yourself

1. What confused me while working on this?
2. What will confuse the next person?
3. What was non-obvious or surprising?
4. What would make debugging this easier?
5. What pattern am I repeating that could be extracted?

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