The cost of one extra round trip

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.