Quoting Vicki Boykis
Jan 2, 2026
Vicki Boykis’ year in review is excellent throughout (as her writing always is) but I loved this line in particular:
The forking branches of a decision tree in a codebase, are likewise boundless, and the neat part is that there is no right answer. You are constrained by your business requirements, but the choice of implementation of those requirements is of an endless variety. It will depend on: the stack you already have, the budget for the rest of the stack, your own past experience and engineering values, the social norms and expectations of your team and their collective experience, the industry’s vocabulary, the language you’re writing in, its conventions and affordances, and how much time you have to actually think about, finish, and merge this current PR before you need to deploy. That’s why staff engineers make money mostly by saying “it depends” for years on end in different ways.