On reading other people's code

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.

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 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.