Clean code practices, system design, architecture patterns, and development methodologies
Most internal RFCs are written for the author, not the reviewer. A format shift and a forcing function — a 48-hour async comment window — changed adoption rates on our team.
Retrying without idempotency creates duplicate orders, double charges, and phantom events. The idempotency key pattern and where it breaks under network partition.
URL-based versioning is visible and cacheable. Header-based versioning is cleaner but invisible to CDN logs. The Sunset header for deprecation communication is underused.
printf-style logs are not queryable. Structured JSON logs with correlation IDs are. The cardinality rules and sampling strategy that keep your logging bill reasonable.
Every novel technology choice adds risk. The engineering case for choosing Postgres over a graph database, REST over gRPC, and Python over Rust when the product is not yet defined.