Category: Lessons Learned

A config file listed Norway as NO, and YAML 1.1 read it as false. Two days of debugging later, I quote everything that reads like English.

One force push on a Friday afternoon, three commits gone, and the four-minute rescue that got them back.

I still remember my first on-call shift. It was a Friday night, I was three drinks in, and my phone started buzzing. Production database was down. My heart rate spiked. I had no idea what to do. That’s when I realized — nobody teaches you this stuff. You learn to code. You learn algorithms. But…

I used to Dockerize everything. Every project, every service, every side hustle — straight into a Dockerfile. It felt right. “Works on my machine” solved, reproducible environments, production parity. What could go wrong? Turns out, a lot. At least for local development. The Docker Desktop Tax Docker Desktop is hungry. On my MacBook, it easily…

Last month I was debugging a feature that should have taken two hours. It took two days. The code was a mess — sprawling functions, nested conditionals, and comments that hadn’t been updated since 2019. I’d had enough. I started deleting. What I Actually Deleted The original module was around 2,400 lines. After my “refactoring…

I spent three months building what I thought was a masterpiece. Clean architecture. Proper separation of concerns. Full test coverage. Everything I learned in my career, poured into this side project. Then I stopped working on it. Not because I got busy. Not because I lost interest. I stopped because it was too damn hard…

The Moment I Realized Something Was Wrong I spent three hours designing a “scalable” solution for a feature that would maybe get 100 users. Built a custom caching layer. Created an elaborate state management system. Added metrics and monitoring everywhere. It took two weeks to ship. The feature worked fine. Nobody noticed any of the…

I’ve spent more hours staring at error messages than I’d like to admit. But somewhere along the way, I realized debugging isn’t just about fixing code—it’s about thinking clearly when everything feels broken. The Frustration Is Real You know that feeling. You’ve been debugging for 3 hours. You changed something, broke something else, and now…

Here’s a story about the time I over-engineered a simple problem and learned a hard lesson about message queues. What Happened It was 2022. I had an API endpoint that processed user uploads and sent confirmation emails. The endpoint was slow – sometimes timing out when thousands of users uploaded at once. My first thought:…

How It Started As a backend developer, I used to treat every side project like a potential unicorn startup. I’d spin up a microservice architecture, integrate a message broker, add caching layers, and set up CI/CD pipelines — for a project that might never see a production user. It wasn’t just excitement; it was a…