The Limit You Never Raised
Caps are set once, at a moment that quickly stops resembling the present. The ones that stay put become invisible ceilings on what customers can do with your product.
Blog
A Timestamp Without a Zone Is a Guess
Storing when something happened is easy. Storing it in a way that still means the same thing in another country, six months later, is where systems quietly go wrong.
The Scheduled Job That Ran Twice
Recurring work looks simple until you ask what happens when a run is late, overlaps the next one, or fires on a machine that thinks it's a different hour.
Two Clocks Never Agree
Every machine's clock is slightly wrong, and they're wrong in different directions. Code that compares timestamps across machines is trusting a consensus that doesn't exist.
Nobody Is Sure This Is Unused
Code accumulates not because anyone wants it, but because removing it requires certainty nobody has. The fix is making that certainty cheap to obtain.
Removal Needs an Owner Too
Everything that gets built has someone who wanted it. Almost nothing that should be removed has anyone whose job it is to notice.
The Feature Two Customers Use
The hardest things to remove aren't unused — they're barely used. Someone real depends on them, and that's enough to keep them alive indefinitely by default.
Hiding the Button Is Not a Check
Where a permission is enforced matters more than how it's modeled. Interfaces hide options; only the layer that touches data can actually deny anything.
Permissions Are a Product Decision
Access control gets treated as plumbing and built by whoever drew the short straw. It's actually a description of how your customers' organizations work.
Someone Has to Be Able to Answer This
"Who can see this record, and why?" is the question a permission system exists to answer. If nobody can answer it without reading code, the system has already failed.