Philosophy

Most people approach life like a sprint, a status tournament, or a lottery. They follow the default playbook handed down by society: chase prestigious titles, buy things to impress strangers, compare their daily lives to other people’s highlight reels, and burn out trying to sprint through what is actually a multi-decade marathon. The tragedy of this default game is not that people fail. The real tragedy is that many work ruthlessly hard for decades, “win,” and realize they conquered a mountain they never cared to climb in the first place. ...

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. ...