Boring choices I keep making

Every time I revisit a project after six months, I find at least one place where past-me wrote a comment that present-me has now stopped trusting. Comments rot faster than code.

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.

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.

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.

Caches solve a problem and create three new ones: invalidation, observability, and the slow drift between what the cache thinks is true and what the source thinks is true.

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.