On giving talks I haven't given

Most of the trouble I see in production comes from boundary cases someone promised would never happen. The code is fine. The plan is fine. The promise is what ages badly.

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.

When a system surprises me, my first instinct used to be to fix the surprise. Now my first instinct is to figure out which mental model of mine was wrong, and update that.

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

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.