Linnea is a code generator for the translation of high-level linear algebra problems to efficient code. Unlike other languages and libraries for linear algebra, Linnea heavily relies on domain-specific knowledge to rewrite expressions and infer matrix properties. Here we focus on two aspects related to code generation and matrix properties: 1) The automatic generation of code consisting of explicit calls to BLAS and LAPACK kernels, and the corresponding challenge with specialized storage formats. 2) A general notion of banded matrices can be used to simplify the inference of many matrix properties. While it is crucial to make use of matrix properties to achieve high performance, inferring those properties is challenging. We show how matrix bandwidth can be used as a unifying language to reason about many common matrix properties.