I started writing code professionally in 2012. This year marks eleven years. The milestone prompts a kind of stock-taking that I find useful to do in writing. This is not a career advice post. It’s a personal retrospective on what happened, what I learned, and what I’d change — useful mostly as a data point rather than a prescription. ...
Two years. Long enough that the novelty is gone and what’s left is the actual experience of living with the decision. Here’s the retrospective I’d want to have read before starting. ...
Three years into building trading systems, the end of 2014 felt like a good moment to stop and audit what we’d built. Not a full rewrite assessment — more a structured reflection on which bets paid off, which didn’t, and what the data was telling us about where the gaps were. This kind of review is undervalued in fast-moving engineering organisations. You learn a lot from production behaviour over years that you can’t learn from design docs. ...