Reading the standard library

When a system surprises me, my first instinct used to be to fix the surprise. Now my first instinct is to figure out which mental model of mine was wrong, and update that.

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.

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.

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

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.