Running the same codebase for 10+ years with a small team is what finally made me fully internalize these rules.

I've always been a KISS/DRY person but over a decade there are plenty of moments where you're tempted to reach for a fancier database or rewrite something in a trendier stack. What's actually kept things running well at scale is boring, known technologies and only optimizing in the places where it actually matters.

We wrote our principles down recently and it basically just reads like Pike's rules in different words: https://www.geocod.io/code-and-coordinates/2025-09-30-develo...