The most important insight I've had in the last few years is that constraints are a feature, not a bug. When you have unlimited resources, you can solve any problem in a hundred different ways. When you have constraints—limited memory, limited time, limited developers—you're forced to think more clearly.

APIs are contracts. Once you publish one, changing it becomes expensive for everyone who depends on it. The cost of breaking changes compounds over time, which is why the boring, conservative choice is usually the right one.

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Code reviews are less about finding bugs and more about ensuring that the team understands why a decision was made. The review is a conversation, not a gate.

The best code is often the code you don't write.

Type systems don't prevent bugs—they just catch certain categories of bugs earlier. The real benefit is the documentation they provide about what a function is supposed to do.