Quiet UIs and loud bugs

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.

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.

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.

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.