Numbers I check before merging

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.

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.

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.

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.