My Ideals

These are ideologies, not rules. Meeting these principles is a non-stop battle; the goal is to keep reaching, not to arrive.

These ideologies apply outside of codebases and should affect how we do most of our work.

Philosophy

• Effort Is the Enemy — every line of code is a liability; so is every doc, meeting, and process
• Simplicity Over Complexity — simple is harder than complex; put in the work to save your future self
• Separation of Concerns — a place for everything, and everything in its place - applies whether you're splitting a monolith or a meeting agenda
• Choose Deliberately — actions chosen by omission, indecision, or assumption are still decisions, and they contain unknown consequences
• 80/20 — follow what you know works 80% of the time; let context override convention the other 20%
• Not Everything Deserves Equal Effort — invest best thinking in the core; not every discussion or implementation deserves effort
• Deliver Value as Often as Possible — small, verifiable increments
• Deliver Value as Soon as Possible — close the gap between writing code and proving it in context; make choices that lead to earlier delivery
• Avoid Brittle Everything — resilience comes from simplicity and loose coupling; applies to code, docs, processes, and architectures

Principles

• Twelve-Factor - A methodology for portable, resilient, scalable applications
• Functional Programming - Purity, composition, and declarative transformations
• Agnostic Core - Keep business logic free of infrastructure concerns
• Modeling - Structure driven by the problem, not the framework
• Testing - Test behavior, not code
• Codebase - Code, dependencies, and configuration
• Error Handling - Let errors bubble up, handle at the top
• Code Ownership - Everyone owns everything
• Operations - Build, deploy, and run applications reliably