developer's learnings

Typed languages are essential on teams with mixed experience levels.

Java is a great language because it’s boring!

Objects are extremely good at what they’re good at. Blind devotion to functional is dumb.

Monoliths remain pretty good.

Micro-services require justification (they’ve increasingly just become assumed).

The “best tool for the job” is often the “least-worst tool across many jobs”. Operating a zoo is the real tax.

Engineering is about communication.

Clarity is seniority. Cleverness is overhead. Optimize for the maintainer at 2am, not your elegance.

There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity.

Very few abstractions exist in general application development. Just write the code you need.

Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call. Every abstraction is a bet that you won’t need to understand what’s underneath.

ORMs are devil in all languages and all implementations. Just write the SQL.

DynamoDB is no good choice for general application development.

It’s very hard to beat decades of RDBMS research and improvements.

Most projects don’t need to “scale” and are damaged by pretending so.

Do reinvent the wheel!. This is how you learn, and is the first step to make new, better wheels.

Don’t re-write things that work.

Code comments are NOT useless.

First do it, then do it right, then do it better. Momentum creates clarity. Analysis paralysis creates nothing.

Dwelling on variables you cannot control creates anxiety without agency.

The fastest code is code that never runs.

If you can’t explain how a process reduces risk or increases clarity, it’s probably just overhead.