Things broken on purpose

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

Latency budgets work better than latency targets. Targets are aspirational. Budgets force you to delete features when you go over.

Caches solve a problem and create three new ones: invalidation, observability, and the slow drift between what the cache thinks is true and what the source thinks is true.

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.

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.