Bits

Treat every platform—cloud, database, or analytics stack—as a partner, not a prison. Build on their strengths, but design your exit plan on day one. Portable data formats, open protocols and Infrastructure-as-Code make it painless to switch or scale. When you can leave, you actually stay by choice. That freedom keeps vendors honest and your strategy yours.
Freedom isn’t just a technical safety net; it’s a negotiation tool. A team that can move at will sets the pace of the relationship and keeps innovation in its own hands.

A linter is more than a style cop; it’s an invisible mentor. Consistent formatting eliminates petty debates, frees mental space and highlights true defects early. It creates a shared dialect so every pull request speaks the same language before humans ever review it.
Great teams automate this discipline—run the linter in CI, fail the build on drift. Clean code becomes culture, and culture scales faster than documentation.

Lightweight tools keep projects nimble. Resist the temptation to fill your IDE with flashy extensions or hard-coded preferences. Rely on environment variables and standard config files instead. Anyone can clone the repo and start coding without replicating your workstation.
This is marketing in disguise: a frictionless developer experience sells your project to future contributors and keeps onboarding time near zero.

A new developer should move from clone to running app with a single bash command. Migrations, vendor downloads, seeders and log setup should all live in that script. The less a newcomer wrestles with setup, the faster they can deliver value.
Think of it as the unboxing experience for your codebase: the smoother it is, the more likely people will return and advocate for it.

Logs are both lifeline and liability. Never leak secrets or personal data—ever. If you must trace sensitive values, encode or mask them and keep decoding tools behind strict access. Security is not a feature you bolt on; it’s a story you tell every day.
Customers and teammates trust systems that respect privacy by default. Protecting secrets in logs is an easy win that speaks volumes about the integrity of your engineering practice.

A comment should explain "why", not hide a guilty conscience. If you’re apologizing to future you with ‘// sorry for this hack’, you already know what to fix. Don’t ship shame; ship clarity. Explain the intent, not the mess.
Think of comments as a note to the next maintainer: a love letter, not a crime report. They’ll remember you for insight, not excuses.

If your code lives only on your laptop, it’s a pet—not a project. Git is the price of admission to professional software. Commit early, branch often, and write messages your grandma can read. She may not code, but she’ll know if you phoned it in.
Good history tells a story: what you built, why you built it, and when you went off the rails. Future you will send a thank-you card.

Debugging at 3 a.m. is not character-building—it’s a tax on poor planning. Automated tests save you from future nervous breakdowns and awkward post-mortems. They don’t have to be perfect; they just have to exist.
Write tests like you write insurance policies: you hope never to need the payout, but you’ll sleep better knowing they’re there.

Your code is not self-documenting; it barely documents today’s you. Tomorrow’s you will be a stranger. A README isn’t busywork—it’s the welcome mat to your project. Skip it and you’re the neighbor who never cuts the grass.
A well-written README sells your project better than a thousand tweets. Treat it like marketing: crisp headline, quick demo, clear install path.

Premature optimization is the cardio of programming: you know you should, but you’ll only hurt yourself if you start sprinting before you can walk. Make it work, then measure, then make it fast.
Users notice slow features; they notice buggy ones more. Solve correctness before you flex benchmarks.

Old code is like old milk: the smell isn’t getting better. If a feature has no users or a utility no longer serves, remove it. Dead code is technical debt with compound interest.
Celebrate deletions in pull requests. A minus sign is often more heroic than a plus.

Nothing humbles a developer faster than a three-way merge at 5 p.m. on a Friday. Breathe. Communicate. Rebase early and often to keep conflicts small enough to laugh at.
Consider conflicts a team-building exercise: nothing unites people like surviving Git’s passive-aggressive messages together.

If you push straight to production, you’re not bold—you’re reckless. A staging environment is the sandbox where you break things before your customers do.
Treat staging like Broadway treats previews: the audience is smaller, the stakes lower, but the applause when you open for real is earned.

Rolling out a new feature to everyone at once is like proposing on the first date. Use feature flags. Start small, measure, then expand. It’s romance with analytics.
Flags let you ship half-finished work safely and flip the switch when you’re ready—like a secret level in your own game.

Logs aren’t a data dump; they’re a narrative. Time-stamped drama that explains what really happened when the system wasn’t looking. Write logs as if a future detective will read them—because they will.
Good logs are like good journalism: facts first, bias never, enough context to make sense without guesswork.