A short list of useful Make targets

When a system surprises me, my first instinct used to be to fix the surprise. Now my first instinct is to figure out which mental model of mine was wrong, and update that.

I write smaller commits than I used to. The commits are uglier in isolation and much easier to read in sequence.

If a config file has more than a dozen options, half of them aren't being used. The other half are being used in ways the original author didn't predict.

The fastest debugging trick I've learned is to write out, in one sentence, what the system is supposed to be doing. Half the time I notice the bug while writing the sentence.

I keep a small log of decisions in a text file. Not architectural — just small ones. "Picked X over Y because Z." Future me reads it more than I thought he would.