REST APIs designed before they are written — clear resources, honest error states, and a data model that still makes sense six months in.
Work close to the machine: storage engines, concurrency, and the memory and I/O behaviour that decides whether a system holds under load.
Measure, then change. Profiles and query plans decide what gets optimised — never a hunch about where the time is going.
Controlled experiments with reproducible pipelines, fixed seeds and metrics written to disk — so a result can be defended, not just reported.
Small commits, real code review, green CI. The unglamorous parts are what make shipping to production routine instead of eventful.
Frontends built with the same care as the services behind them — typed, accessible, and fast on the devices people actually use.
Before anything is written, the question is what breaks and under what conditions — concurrency, crash, scale, or all three. Duplicate records mean state is wrong upstream, and that is where the work starts.
Schema and retrieval path together, not search bolted onto an existing model. A data model that survives six months of change is worth more than any amount of clever code above it.
Incremental delivery through Git, real code review and CI. Small changes are easier to review, easier to revert, and much easier to attribute when something moves in the wrong direction.
Profiles, query plans, benchmarks, load tests, fault injection and sanitizers. If the improvement cannot be measured after the fact, it was a guess that happened to feel faster.
See how this plays out in practice.