Quiet UIs and loud bugs

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's a kind of premature optimization that comes from imagining a future team. "What if someone needs to swap this out?" Often, no one does.