Rob Walling

And the right level of quality depends on the usage and the risk and what it needs to scale to.

So you can build something that scales to infinity users and is so incredibly abstracted and maintainable and so compact and performant and all this stuff.

And then you have five internal users.

And you just don't need to really build that, right?

So if you have five internal users versus 10,000 simultaneous public users trying to validate a credit card, learning that spectrum and learning when to cut corners, maybe you're probably cringing if you're hearing this, but sometimes you just need to move quickly on some things.

And I think...

not thinking in absolutes, which I was apt to do.

I think a lot of us in our teen years and early 20s think in these absolutes and there's no nuance to our thinking.

I know I was definitely like that and a little too engineering.

This is where I started learning, ah, there's, you know, it's not just some absolute that someone would say on social media that didn't exist yet.

But, you know, people love to talk in absolutes and say all caps, always and never.

And it is almost always never the right choice to talk in absolutes.

So my takeaways from there were that founders do not have infinite time.

And knowing which corners to cut, how many corners to cut without hurting the company long term was a skill that I learned in that job.

Lesson number eight was learning who I wanted to work with and why.

So I'm a software developer.

I'm an individual contributor.

And what I noticed is that as I would meet and work with other engineers, I knew within one project who I wanted to collaborate with.

And sometimes it was the strongest developers and sometimes it wasn't.

Sometimes it was the people who were coachable.