Quiet UIs and loud bugs

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.

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.

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.

I keep a small log of decisions in a text file. Not architectural — just small ones. "Picked X over Y because Z." Future me reads it more than I thought he would.