The cost of one extra round trip

Most of the trouble I see in production comes from boundary cases someone promised would never happen. The code is fine. The plan is fine. The promise is what ages badly.

Latency budgets work better than latency targets. Targets are aspirational. Budgets force you to delete features when you go over.

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.

I split a 4000-line file into 12 smaller ones this week. The smaller files weren't actually easier to understand. The 4000-line file was a problem of structure, not of length.

Every time I revisit a project after six months, I find at least one place where past-me wrote a comment that present-me has now stopped trusting. Comments rot faster than code.

If a config file has more than a dozen options, half of them aren't being used. The other half are being used in ways the original author didn't predict.