Of all the lessons I’ve learned, there is one that can summarize them all in 3 simple words: everything is terrible. This text is an attempt to recount some of the hard-earned lessons I have ended up learning, sometimes indirectly, but often personally. Everything is terrible, but our job still is to build something solid and usable on top of that everything. What we build adds to that ‘everything’, makes it bigger, more terrible.

Existing systems come with all sorts of terrors; each time I touch something, I cause subtle ripples that disrupt the careful balance of all the elements holding it together. Each bug fixed opens the door to a bigger one, hidden deeper, and more violent.

Writing new systems comes with an inescapable feeling of dread. I can imagine everything failing before it has been written, and feel sorry for the person who’ll maintain it—possibly me.