Software you can still change in year three
Moving fast in the first month is easy. The expensive month is the eighteenth, when a small change touches nine files and nobody remembers why. We spend the early weeks on the data model and the boundaries between modules, because those are the decisions that cost the most to undo.
Boring where it counts
For the parts of a system that must never surprise anyone, authentication, payments, background jobs and backups, we use well-understood tools with long track records. The novelty belongs in the part of the product that is actually your idea.
