A debugging session leads to an unexpected lesson in communication. When a colleague dismisses you with ‘you don’t understand,’ the conversation is already lost — no matter how valid the point. Say it so they can hear it.

A mysterious exitFunc led me to a 4-year-old workaround hiding a mutex bug. Instead of fixing the root cause, someone had silently restarted the pod on panic. A reminder that masking problems robs you of growth—always dig deeper and find the real bug.

Best practices don’t age well. They emerge to solve specific problems, and when those problems fade, so should the dogma. So why do so many developers adopt techniques without asking what problem they were solving in the first place?

A clickbait blog post claimed errors.Is() slows code by 3000%. The real lesson? The author misused sentinel errors for a non-error condition.