A hundred and four days ago I asked two friends — people whose work I respect — whether this would be worth doing. They said yes. That's the whole origin story.
I've inherited messy systems. I've run them. And what I've watched happen, again and again, is this: a codebase grows, the pressure rises, and people stop asking why. They take what's there, they keep moving, they match the pattern in front of them. Nobody decides to break the fundamentals. It just erodes, one reasonable shortcut at a time.
Then one day it's a mess, and nobody can point to the moment it became one.
That's what these hundred cards have been arguing against. Not a technology. The habit of moving without asking what we're trading away.
Engineering isn't just my livelihood. It's the thing I actually love, and I can't make peace with bad work — not when the cost lands on whoever inherits it.
Thank you for reading.
— Sathyan
A hundred days of fundamentals, one screenshot at a time. Tomorrow we start the second hundred.