5 articles in this topic
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" is the most-quoted line in programming. It's true. But it's been twisted into an excuse to ignore performance entirely — and that's its own kind of evil.
Most engineers think of tests as bug-catchers. That framing leads to bad tests. The real purpose of a test suite is confidence — the freedom to change code without fear. Reframe it and you write better tests.
There's an old joke that the two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation and naming things. The joke is real. Good names are documentation that never goes stale — and bad ones are bugs waiting to happen.
Engineers are rewarded for writing code, so they write more of it. But every line is a liability — something to maintain, debug, and secure. The most valuable code is often the code you didn't write.
Technical debt has become a slur — a thing to feel guilty about. But debt is a tool. Borrowed deliberately and repaid on schedule, it's how fast teams stay fast. The danger is the debt you don't track.
