These are not rules. They’re heuristics: patterns that help me build better, think clearer, and waste less time. Some came from books, some from mentors, some from mistakes, and some from conversations with minds very different from my own. I keep them short because I re-read them under pressure, and long lists don’t survive pressure.

Direction matters more than speed

Power without direction is just speed. Before asking “how do I build this?” ask “should this exist, and for whom?” Not every efficient system is a good system. The people who build things are responsible for what those things do in the world. Not just whether they work. Whether they help.

Talk to the pain first

Before you build anything, find the people who have the pain and ask about it. Not to sell. To listen. What’s the hardest part of your work? What have you tried that didn’t work? One person’s pain is an anecdote. Five is a signal. Ten is a market. People are bad at predicting what they want and excellent at describing what hurts.

Cross the build barrier

Nothing, something, experience, build. Most ideas die between experience and build, because thinking is comfortable and building commits. Lower the activation energy: create one file, make one call, list one product. Momentum is real, and perfection is the enemy of existence.

Planning counts as building, but only with a gate. “I’ll decide by Friday” works. “I’ll decide when I feel ready” doesn’t, because readiness never fully arrives for anyone who takes decisions seriously. Explore less as the deadline approaches, then commit. If both options are good, that’s not a hard decision. Pick one. (AI makes this harder; I wrote about why in The Neurochemical Illusion.)

Always deliver something

If you can’t ship a feature, ship a design. If you can’t ship a design, ship a list of the right questions. Something on the table creates surface area for feedback. Nothing creates silence, and silence is where projects go to die.

Think in tradeoffs and systems

There’s rarely a best option, only the right one for this context. If you can’t name what a choice sacrifices, you don’t understand it yet. Best practices are just tradeoffs someone else evaluated for a context that may not be yours.

Then zoom out: where does the input come from, where does the output go, what fails, who maintains it, what changes over time. Opportunities often live in the gaps between components that nobody is looking at.

Understand the why, not just the how

The how gets you through today’s task. The why gets you through next year’s redesign, and makes you the person others come to when things break. Go one level deeper than the task requires.

Update your beliefs

Most people form an opinion early and filter everything after it through that opinion. Hold yours loosely. Changing your mind costs nothing; defending a wrong position costs everything. The people who update fastest learn fastest. The ego wants consistency, but consistency without updating is just stubbornness wearing a suit.

Seek what compounds

A single deliverable is valuable once. A brand, a network, or a body of written work gets more valuable over time. Solve someone’s pain to earn trust, then become the infrastructure that keeps it solved.

Writing is the cheapest compounding asset I know. Your future self is a different person who won’t remember why you decided what you decided. Write it down for them. Writing also forces understanding: you can’t write clearly about something you don’t understand.

Range is a feature

The pressure is to pick a lane. But the most interesting problems live at intersections. A data engineer who cares about civic infrastructure sees problems that neither a pure engineer nor a pure activist would recognize. Don’t apologize for your range. It’s the reason you see things others don’t.

Form is function

A well-designed interface reduces cognitive load. A clean codebase is easier to debug. Typography affects comprehension, and layout sets hierarchy. These are measurable effects, not preferences. If someone will experience it, its form matters.

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These ideas come from Kleppmann, consulting work, open-source communities, mistakes, and conversations with minds very different from my own. What I’ve added is the combination and the lived experience of applying them. This list used to have fifteen entries. Following “Update your beliefs,” I cut it to ten.

If one of these saves you an hour of spinning, or helps you cross from “I could build this” to “I am building this,” it was worth writing.