Every code review checklist I've ever seen...in books, in onboarding docs, in Twitter threads...covers the same six things: tests, naming, style, error handling, complexity, and "did the author actually think about this."
Those things matter...they're table stakes. But they're not what catches the bugs that actually hit production.
For years now, I've kept a personal code review checklist. Every time I miss a real issue in review, I add the thing that would have caught it. The list has grown, then gotten cut back, then grown again. At this point it has five items the standard checklists don't, and they catch most of the problems the standard ones miss.
Here they are...
1. Observability changes
