The most important insight I've had in the last few years is that constraints are a feature, not a bug. When you have unlimited resources, you can solve any problem in a hundred different ways. When you have constraints—limited memory, limited time, limited developers—you're forced to think more clearly.

The idea that frameworks solve problems is mostly marketing. They shift the nature of the problems, making some things easier and others harder. The trick is choosing the right tools for your constraints.

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APIs are contracts. Once you publish one, changing it becomes expensive for everyone who depends on it. The cost of breaking changes compounds over time, which is why the boring, conservative choice is usually the right one.

Make boring choices.

Type systems don't prevent bugs—they just catch certain categories of bugs earlier. The real benefit is the documentation they provide about what a function is supposed to do.