A week without Slack

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.

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.

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

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.

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.