Tony

I’m at The White House yall! Tech got me here!! I’m just a normal person who decided to learn how to code and it opened up endless possibilities!! Don’t give up! Keep grinding and your time will come 💪🏽

The worst bug I ever shipped taught me more than 10 years of clean code books. Spent 3 days hunting a race condition in our payment system. Turned out to be a single missing `await` keyword. Cost us $50k in failed transactions. Now I rubber duck every async function. Hubris ...

Building my first startup taught me that customers don't buy solutions to problems they don't know they have. At my day job, requirements came pre-validated. Someone else did the hard work of figuring out what people actually wanted. As a founder, I spent 6 months building t...

Hot take: I've hired 200+ engineers and the best predictor of success isn't leetcode performance. It's whether they ask clarifying questions before diving into code. The ones who immediately start coding usually flame out in 6 months. The ones who spend 5 minutes understandin...

Now I start concrete and refactor when I actually need the abstraction. Turns out, 80% of the interfaces I used to create were never needed. Sometimes the best practice is knowing when to ignore best practices.

The worst part? When requirements changed (and they always do), those beautiful abstractions became prisons. What should have been a 5-line fix became a 3-day refactoring nightmare across multiple interfaces. I was optimizing for theoretical flexibility that never materialized.

That "best practice" of abstracting everything behind interfaces? I've seen it turn simple codebases into unmaintainable messes more times than I can count. Here's what I learned: 🧵

The best founders I know ship embarrassingly early versions of the right thing, not polished versions of the wrong thing. What's the most "broken" thing you shipped that actually worked?

Fast shipping isn't about cutting corners everywhere. It's about being surgical with your corners. Cut: Perfect UI polish, edge case handling, fancy animations Never cut: Data integrity, security basics, core user flow Your users will forgive ugly. They won't forgive broken.

I've shipped broken products that made millions and perfect products that nobody used. The "ship fast vs ship right" debate misses the point entirely. Here's what 15 years taught me: 🧵

The skill that 10x'd my effectiveness wasn't coding—it was learning to ask "what problem are we actually solving?" before writing any code. I used to jump straight into implementation. Now I spend 30% of my time clarifying requirements upfront. Saves me from rewriting entire ...

90% of rewrites fail because teams rewrite the code they can see, not the knowledge they can't. I've watched brilliant engineers spend 18 months rebuilding a "messy" system, only to recreate the same edge cases and business logic quirks that made the original code look weird ...

A 2-hour production outage taught me the most expensive debugging lesson of my career. Before: "The logs show everything is fine, must be user error." After: Always check what's NOT in the logs first. The bug? Our logging service was down. We were debugging blindfolded for ...

The difference between junior and senior engineers isn't years of experience—it's how they handle being wrong. Juniors defend their code like it's their firstborn. Seniors say "you're right, let me fix that" and move on. What's the hardest feedback you've had to accept about...

I'd overcomplicate every solution to show off my technical chops. Simple CRUD app? Let me add event sourcing and CQRS. Basic API? Obviously needs a custom framework. My code reviews were essays about why everyone else was wrong.

The real education happens when you're responsible for every part of the machine breaking down. What's the most valuable thing you learned building something on your own?

You discover that most problems aren't technical. My biggest startup failure had perfect code and zero customers. I spent 8 months optimizing queries that no one would ever run. Corporate jobs shield you from this reality with dedicated sales, marketing, and support teams.

Your day job will teach you to be a good employee. Building your own thing will teach you to think like an owner. These are completely different skill sets. Here's what 6 years of side projects taught me that W2 work never could: