Numbers I check before merging

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.

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 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.

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.

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