- Effective use of guard clauses to prevent unaccounted conditions from proceeding in a method
- No vague variable names.
- Reward brevity.
- Is this the least amount of code possible to accomplish the goal?
- Don't allow anything upstream which is below-quality, even if it's legacy code. The exceptions being that the it's third-party, the time to refactor isn't reasonable, or the file spans numerous concerns and isn't practical to refactor.
- If you don't know the engineer yet, err on the side of politeness and don't assume they have a thick skin forged from years in open-source.