Doomers and hawks
I've spent about a decade watching the careful work get cut first whenever a date slips, so I know exactly what the safety people are worried about, and I still come down on going faster.
Rubber duck debugging, in writing
Half the questions I write in a channel never get sent, because I figure out the answer somewhere in the middle of writing them, and I've stopped thinking of that as wasted effort.
Nobody demos an upgrade
The best possible outcome of a migration is that nothing happens, which looks exactly the same from the outside as having done nothing at all.
The loan with no lender
A ticket I wrote in 2022 asking for a few days to clean up the checkout templates has now outlived 2 project management tools, and in 3 years not one person has argued against doing it.
The third proposal
A proposal landed in August to rebuild a client platform from scratch, and when I went digging in the shared drive I found two older ones saying almost exactly the same thing.
They deleted the line
I asked a developer on an outside team why a line was there, meaning it literally, and they deleted it, which is roughly when I understood that the approve button had been doing the talking.
The big file was dead
I spent my first full day on an inherited store reading the file everybody had warned me about, and the git log said nobody had changed a line of it since 2018.
Worth doing badly
Chesterton's line about doing things badly is the most useful thing I know about actually finishing anything, and it goes well past side projects.