Five Years in Production: Engineering Trade-offs, Systems Thinking, and Longevity
Five years ago, I entered software engineering believing that great engineers were the ones who wrote the most intricate algorithms, mastered every esoteric language feature, and adopted every cutting-edge framework on day one. After shipping multiple healthcare SaaS platforms, maintaining 24/7 high-throughput streaming systems, and being woken up by PagerDuty at 2:30 AM on a Saturday, my perspective on what “good software” means has transformed completely. Here are the guiding principles I now carry with me into every architecture review and every line of code. ...