There's a massive difference between writing code that deploys and maintaining code that runs in production for months. The first teaches you how to build. The second teaches you what you got wrong.
The lesson I took from this is that learning resources have a shelf life — not because they expire, but because you do. The right book at the wrong time is a waste. The right book at the right time can save you months.
There was a phase in my career — somewhere around year three — where I thought I was ready for the big architectural decisions. I wanted to design the system, not just implement features within someone else's design.
So when our team discussed breaking apart a growing monolith, I pushed hard for a microservices approach. I'd read the blog posts. I'd watched the conference talks. I had diagrams. I was convinced this was the right move for our scale.
We had about six developers and a few hundred thousand monthly active users.
We didn't need microservices. We needed better module boundaries within our existing codebase. But I didn't know that yet because I hadn't experienced the operational cost of distributed systems firsthand.
This industry moves fast. New frameworks, new languages, new paradigms every year. But the fundamentals — understanding your data, respecting production, learning from failure, staying humble about what you don't know — those haven't changed in decades. They probably won't change in the next seven years either.
Build things. Break things. Fix things. Write about what you learn. That's the whole game.
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