What I look for in an oncall handoff

Every time I revisit a project after six months, I find at least one place where past-me wrote a comment that present-me has now stopped trusting. Comments rot faster than code.

If a config file has more than a dozen options, half of them aren't being used. The other half are being used in ways the original author didn't predict.

When a system surprises me, my first instinct used to be to fix the surprise. Now my first instinct is to figure out which mental model of mine was wrong, and update that.

I write smaller commits than I used to. The commits are uglier in isolation and much easier to read in sequence.

The fastest debugging trick I've learned is to write out, in one sentence, what the system is supposed to be doing. Half the time I notice the bug while writing the sentence.

I trust monorepos more in the second year than I did in the first. Most of the early friction goes away once the tooling catches up.