Three log lines that saved an outage

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.