23. Final Tips

Demonstrate senior judgment: clear assumptions, explicit trade-offs, and operational excellence.

• State assumptions and constraints; call out failure modes and backpressure.
• Choose the simplest design that meets SLOs; avoid premature optimization.
• Prefer composition over inheritance; encode invariants in types and tests.
• Make APIs idempotent by default; document error models and timeouts.
• Measure before you optimize; verify with benchmarks and profiling data.
• Design for operability: logs, metrics, traces, and healthchecks from day one.

Good luck — prioritize clarity, correctness, and safety. Senior engineers communicate trade-offs explicitly.