Episode 4 of our Rozz shorts is about code review. Rozz is reading a PR and thinks "wait, I've seen this bug." Every review teaches you something, but unless you write it down, you learn it again next time.
The note on Rozz's screen is a real one from Dev Second Brain, the Obsidian vault template for developers. It's one of the example PR review notes that come with it: "payments-api 433 Replace hand-rolled retry loop". The PR Review template has five sections: What it changes, What I learned, Patterns to reuse, Patterns to avoid, Comments worth remembering. A role field says whether you were the reviewer or the author getting the feedback.
In the example, the PR swaps a custom for attempt in range(5) retry loop for the shared retry helper. What I learned has the bug: the old loop retried on 400s too, so one malformed request was sent 5 times and logged 5 errors. Patterns to reuse notes that the retry test uses a fake clock instead of sleep. Patterns to avoid is the old code returning None after the last retry instead of re-raising.
Reviews don't stay buried in a folder. Dataview pulls them back up in three places:
- Recent PR learnings on the Home dashboard: your last five reviews, with role, repo and date.
- PR reviews this week in the Weekly Review template, so they're part of your weekly look back.
- PR reviews on each Project note, listing every review linked to that project.
You need Obsidian (free) plus the free Templater and Dataview plugins. It's all plain Markdown files on your own disk.
Episode 5, "Performance review season", is next.
Dev Second Brain is $19 on Gumroad, one person per copy, personal and commercial use allowed: https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/uoybkd
More of what we make: https://engelailabs.com
