Why I went back to plain text

I used to add a layer of abstraction the first time I saw a pattern repeat. Now I wait for the third. The waiting is uncomfortable, but the abstractions that survive that wait tend to last.

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

Most retry logic I've removed turned out to be hiding a real bug. The retries made the failure invisible, and the bug compounded for months in the background.

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.