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What I keep forgetting about timeouts

Daniel C. · Aug 7

I split a 4000-line file into 12 smaller ones this week. The smaller files weren't actually easier to understand. The 4000-line file was a problem of structure, not of length.

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.

Caches solve a problem and create three new ones: invalidation, observability, and the slow drift between what the cache thinks is true and what the source thinks is true.

Every time I revisit a project after six months, I find at least one place where past-me wrote a comment that present-me has now stopped trusting. Comments rot faster than code.

I write smaller commits than I used to. The commits are uglier in isolation and much easier to read in sequence.

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