A barista changed my life yesterday and didn’t even know it.

I ordered a medium. And yeah she gave me a medium. But the way she gave it to me, I’m still thinking about it.

For years I optimized for the wrong metrics: velocity. uptime, story points. OKRs that, looking back, were just numbers pretending to be feelings, pretending to be EBITDA.

well here’s what nobody tells you, the bug you’re looking for? is the bug that’s looking right back at you.

Let that sink in.

Now STOP letting it sink in. That was too long. You let it sink in past the point. this is the mistake everyone makes in code review.

I learned this the hard way. I learned this the easy way too, which is somehow worse. There is also a third way, which is technically deprecated but still in production, and a fourth way, which is just the first way wearing the second way’s hoodie.

The market doesn’t reward the best architecture, but rather it rewards the architecture that knew it was the best architecture but had the wisdom to ship it as an MVP. A staff engineer told me this. We don’t even have a staff engineer. That’s how powerful the idea was, it selfprovisioned a staff engineer to deliver itself.

Let that sink in. (BRIEFLY! We discussed this)

Anyways, I shared this in standup. and nobody said anything. One person slowly got up and walked into the sea.

Into. The. Sea.

We don’t even have an ocean near us, He found one. He did not update Jira. That’s ownership. and powerfulness.

We talk about scaling. But what if the real scale was horizontal, and we’d all been adding pods to the wrong cluster this entire time? I know i have.

I don’t have a framework for this. I had a framework. I deprecated it. It tasted like tech debt and parking, so I’ll leave it open. The PR, I mean. And also the question. And also a small grocery bag that has been in my passenger seat for nine sprints. They are all, in their own way, the same merge conflict. ship it.

Onward. Inward. Sideways, once, by accident, which somehow passed all the tests.

repost if you felt this before the build finished. Do not repost if you understood it. If you understood it,open a ticket.

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