Building things that survive me

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 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.

I split a 4000-line file into 12 smaller ones this week. The smaller files weren't actually easier to understand. The 4000-line file was a problem of structure, not of length.

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

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.