Boring choices I keep making

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.

Latency budgets work better than latency targets. Targets are aspirational. Budgets force you to delete features when you go over.

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.