The best programming articles of 2025

Happy New Year! 🥳

I hope you enjoyed a nice break and we'll kick this year off with 5 most popular articles from 2025.

1. How to review code
11 minutes by Matthias Endler

Matthias has been reviewing other people’s code for a while now, more than two decades to be precise. Nowadays, he spends around 50-70% of time reviewing code in some form or another. And over time, he learned a thing or two about how to review code effectively.

2. Systems ideas that sound good but almost never work
9 minutes by Steven Sinofsky

Most common engineering pitfalls and anti-patterns, articulated through various "let's just..." scenarios. Steven, drawing from extensive experience, explains why seemingly simple solutions like making systems pluggable, adding APIs, introducing abstractions, implementing cross-platform compatibility, or adding security controls later often fail in practice.

3. The prompt engineering playbook for programmers
about 1 hour by Addy Osmani

AI coding assistants have become essential developer tools, but their effectiveness depends largely on well-crafted prompts. Addy explores systematic approaches to prompt engineering for common development tasks, showing how to transform vague queries into precise instructions that yield high-quality code solutions. Key techniques include providing rich context, specifying clear goals, breaking down complex tasks, including examples, leveraging personas, and iteratively refining prompts through conversation with the AI.

4. Everything I know about good system design
20 minutes by Sean Goedecke

If software design is how you assemble lines of code, system design is how you assemble services. The primitives of software design are variables, functions, classes, and so on. The primitives of system design are app servers, databases, caches, queues, event buses, proxies, and so on.

5. Mistakes you have to make yourself
1 minute by Dan McKinley

In this article Dan brings a humorous yet insightful collection of common programming and technical leadership mistakes that people seem destined to make despite warnings, including misconceptions about code rewrites, system complexity, and team organization. He suggests these lessons can only be learned through personal experience, similar to touching a hot stove to believe it's actually hot.