I once rejected a brilliant engineering candidate because their resume had a typo. Not in their work history. Not in their technical skills. In the summary section: “atention to detail” instead of “attention to detail.” My brain went: “Typo → careless → probably writes buggy code → not a good hire.” I passed. Another company hired them. They became a principal engineer there and later gave a keynote at a major conference. ...

It’s 2 AM. You’ve been coding for six hours straight. You haven’t eaten. You forgot to check your phone. You have no idea where the time went. But you just built the most elegant solution you’ve ever created. The code is clean, the logic is tight, and everything just… works. You snap out of it and realize: you were completely immersed. Time disappeared. Effort felt effortless. You were operating at a level you rarely achieve. ...

We were going to launch the feature on Tuesday. Everyone on the team knew it wasn’t ready. The code was buggy. The UX was confusing. We hadn’t tested the edge cases. One of our engineers literally said in standup, “I’m not sure this is going to work well,” but immediately followed it with, “but I guess everyone else thinks it’s fine.” The PM wanted to hit the deadline. The CEO was excited about the demo. The team had momentum. So we all nodded along. ...

It’s 11 PM. The pull request is due tomorrow. You’ve known about it for a week. You open your laptop. Check Slack. Browse Reddit. Watch a YouTube video about productivity (the irony is not lost on you). Check Twitter. Read an article about procrastination. Look at the clock. 11:47 PM. You finally start working at midnight. You’ll be up until 3 AM, stressed and exhausted, producing mediocre work that you could’ve done calmly in two hours if you’d started earlier. ...

I once worked with two developers who joined our team at the same time. The first developer-let’s call him Mark-was obsessed with levels and compensation. Every conversation circled back to promotions, competing offers, and total comp. He worked hard, sure, but you could tell his eyes glazed over during technical discussions unless they directly impacted his promotion timeline. The second developer-let’s call her Sarah-was obsessed with the craft. She’d spend evenings learning Rust for fun. She volunteered to pair program with junior developers. She got genuinely excited about elegant solutions to gnarly problems. Promotions seemed like an afterthought. ...

I once spent three hours researching React state management libraries. Redux. MobX. Zustand. Jotai. Recoil. XState. Valtio. Context API. useState. useReducer. Each had passionate advocates. Detailed comparisons. Migration guides. Benchmark tests. By hour three, I was paralyzed. Which one was “right”? What if I chose wrong? What if I regretted it? I started with a simple problem: “I need to manage state in my app.” I ended with decision fatigue, imposter syndrome, and zero lines of code written. ...

A critical bug crashed our production system at 2 AM. Slack notifications went out to the entire engineering team-thirty developers. Nobody responded. Not for 45 minutes. Everyone saw the alerts. Everyone assumed someone else would handle it. After all, with thirty people notified, surely someone more senior, more experienced, or more available would jump in. When I finally woke up and fixed it, I found out that seventeen people had been awake and seen the alert. Each one thought, “Someone else will get this.” ...

I landed my dream job at a top tech company. Six figures. Stock options. Free lunch. The works. I spent two years grinding LeetCode problems, perfecting my resume, practicing system design interviews. I was convinced that once I got this job, I’d finally be happy. For about three weeks after I got the offer, I was ecstatic. I couldn’t stop smiling. I told everyone. I posted on LinkedIn (yes, really). This was it. I’d made it. ...

I spent six months building a SaaS product that nobody wanted. The code was beautiful. The architecture was solid. I’d invested countless nights and weekends. I’d turned down freelance work to focus on it. I’d told everyone it was going to be “the one.” And the market response was… crickets. Any rational person would’ve shut it down and moved on. Instead, I spent another six months trying to “make it work.” I pivoted. I added features. I changed the pricing. I rewrote the landing page seventeen times. ...

I used to think Tailwind CSS was terrible. Not because I’d used it extensively. I’d tried it for maybe an hour, felt uncomfortable, and decided it was “just inline styles with extra steps.” Then I spent the next six months seeing only evidence that confirmed my belief: Blog posts criticizing Tailwind? Bookmarked and shared. Tweets praising Tailwind? Scrolled past or found reasons to dismiss them. Projects struggling with Tailwind? “See, I knew it was problematic!” Projects thriving with Tailwind? “They would’ve been fine with CSS modules.” I wasn’t evaluating Tailwind objectively. I was collecting ammunition to defend a conclusion I’d already made. ...