Things broken on purpose

When a system surprises me, my first instinct used to be to fix the surprise. Now my first instinct is to figure out which mental model of mine was wrong, and update that.

The team I learned the most from didn't have great tools. They had a great habit of reading each other's pull requests in full, including the parts that weren't theirs.

I trust monorepos more in the second year than I did in the first. Most of the early friction goes away once the tooling catches up.

The fastest debugging trick I've learned is to write out, in one sentence, what the system is supposed to be doing. Half the time I notice the bug while writing the sentence.

Caches solve a problem and create three new ones: invalidation, observability, and the slow drift between what the cache thinks is true and what the source thinks is true.

I write smaller commits than I used to. The commits are uglier in isolation and much easier to read in sequence.