Three log lines that saved an outage

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.

There's a kind of premature optimization that comes from imagining a future team. "What if someone needs to swap this out?" Often, no one does.

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.

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.

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.