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7 Things I Learned From Senior Engineers’ Code
The biggest differences were rarely clever syntax. They were the boundaries, constraints, failure paths, and assumptions the code made impossible to ignore.
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When I used to imagine “senior-level code,” I expected it to look sophisticated. I assumed experienced engineers would leave behind clever abstractions, advanced language features, elegant patterns, or algorithms that made their expertise immediately obvious.
A lot of the strongest code I have read looked almost disappointingly ordinary at first.
There would be an early return where a larger abstraction could have existed. A type would rule out a strange combination of values before validation ever ran. An external side effect would sit behind a deliberately narrow boundary. Two pieces of code that looked similar would remain separate instead of being forced into a generic helper. Somewhere else, a state transition that could easily have been represented by three booleans would be modeled explicitly.
None of those choices was impressive in the way a clever pull request is impressive. Their value became visible later, when a requirement changed, another engineer modified the feature, or a failure interrupted the happy path halfway…
