Lessons Learned

• A good mentor takes a long time to find and may never come. Enjoy learning on your own and you'll find the right way to do things along the way.
• You can only have two of: features, speed, and quality.
• Don't sacrifice reliability.
• Log a lot and learn observability.
• Measure before optimizing.
• Hire employees before contractors.
• Spread knowledge between teams, prevent silos. However, if you have a silo, keep it for job security.
• Learn IC and EM. After discovering which you enjoy more, stick with it. Don't let a company choose your path.
• Use typed languages.
• Version your APIs.
• Try to prevent breaking changes.
• E2E tests and integration tests are the important ones.
• Composition over inheritance.
• Managers need to make the most use of their best developers. The best developers want/crave a hard problem to solve.
• If you're unprepared or unengaged, your colleagues already know.
• Do not write fancy code. Code should be simple and easy to read.