When you start as a junior developer, you think software engineering is about writing code. A few years in, you think it's about choosing the right architecture and frameworks.
After ten-plus years in the trenches - shipping features, surviving on-call disasters, and watching "perfect" codebases turn into unmaintainable monsters - you realize the truth: Software engineering is mostly about managing complexity, human communication, and trade-offs.
Here are 25 mistakes I made, witnessed, or had to clean up over the past decade. Hopefully, reading them saves you a few years of painful trial and error.
1. Code & Architecture
1. Abstracting Too Early
