What 2018 Taught Me About Building Software

End of the year, time to look back. The team doubled, the projects got bigger, and I spent way more time not writing code than I expected.

Biggest surprise: how much of this job is communication. Understanding what a client actually needs vs what they’re asking for. Figuring out why a project is stuck when the code is fine. Got better at this mostly by getting it wrong a few times.

I want to get serious about performance in 2019. The projects are outgrowing my understanding of caching, background jobs, and database optimization. I’ve been leaning on Rails defaults and they’ve been fine, but “fine” won’t cut it much longer.

Related: our team’s 2018 year in review on the Wolfpack Digital blog.