The best place to teach a junior engineer to think isn't a meeting. It's the commit message.
A recent commit of mine has three parts, no template:
- Problem: portal-based components render into the body and leak styles in Shadow DOM hosts.
- Approach: an optional, additive provider, no behavior change for anyone who doesn't use it.
- Out of scope: Uploader/Modal, since no consumer has asked yet.
That answers the three questions git blame will ask six months from now: why it changed, why this way, and why the rest didn't.
For people early in their careers, the third part is the most valuable. Saying what you did NOT do shows scope was a decision, not an accident.
In mentoring, I stop commenting on the code and start asking: "what's out of scope here?"
Which review question has changed the way your team writes the most?
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