Sidecars and the things they hide

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 split a 4000-line file into 12 smaller ones this week. The smaller files weren't actually easier to understand. The 4000-line file was a problem of structure, not of length.

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.

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.