Dev reflection - February 09, 2026

Hey, it’s Paul. Monday, February 9, 2026.

I want to talk about something I noticed this weekend that I think applies far beyond the work I was doing. It’s about measurement—specifically, what happens when the act of measuring something changes what you’re measuring.

Here’s what happened. I built a rubric. Seventeen criteria, over a hundred testable checkpoints, designed to assess whether a project is ready to ship. Pretty standard stuff—you’ve probably seen similar checklists in your own work. But here’s what I didn’t expect: within 24 hours of the rubric existing, one of my projects went from “we’re making progress” to “we’re 29% ready with a demo in two weeks.”

That number didn’t exist before. The gap it revealed didn’t exist before—not as something visible, anyway. The work was always incomplete, but the shape of the incompleteness was invisible until there was a tool to reveal it.

This is the thing about measurement that I think most organizations get wrong. They treat metrics as mirrors—neutral reflections of reality. But metrics aren’t mirrors. They’re flashlights. They illuminate some things and leave others in darkness. And the moment you point a flashlight somewhere, you change what people do.

The question isn’t whether to measure. You’re going to measure something. The question is: what does your measurement system make visible, and what does it hide? Because whatever you make visible, that’s what gets worked on. Whatever stays hidden, that’s what gets ignored—not because people are lazy, but because attention is finite and it follows the light.

Second thing I’ve been thinking about: the difference between coordination and extraction.

I had seven different applications that needed the same footer. Same branding, same copyright notice, same links. The traditional approach would be coordination: get everyone aligned on what the footer should look like, document it somewhere, trust people to implement it consistently, then audit periodically to catch drift.

That’s exhausting. And it doesn’t work. Not because people are bad at following instructions, but because coordination requires ongoing attention, and attention is the scarcest resource in any organization.

So instead, I did something different. I created one canonical source for the footer and wrote a script that syncs it everywhere. Now when the footer changes, it changes once, and that change flows to all seven applications automatically.

This is extraction, not coordination. Instead of trying to get people to behave consistently, you extract the thing that needs to be consistent into a single source of truth, and you let the system enforce consistency.

Here’s why this matters beyond code: every organization has things that need to be consistent. Brand voice. Pricing logic. Compliance language. The default approach is coordination—meetings, documentation, training, audits. But coordination scales poorly. It requires constant attention, and the moment attention lapses, drift begins.

Extraction scales. When you can identify the thing that needs to be consistent and pull it into a single source that everything else references, you stop fighting drift. You eliminate the category of problem.

The hard part is recognizing what can be extracted. Not everything can. But more things can than most organizations realize. The question to ask isn’t “how do we get everyone aligned on this?” It’s “can we make this exist in exactly one place, so alignment becomes automatic?”

Third observation, and this one surprised me: the order of operations matters more than I thought.

I watched three different projects ship this weekend, and they all did something counterintuitive. They handled accessibility, error handling, and visual polish before setting up production deployment. Not after. Before.

Conventional wisdom says ship first, polish later. Get something out the door, then iterate. And there’s truth to that—perfectionism kills momentum. But what I noticed is that when polish is treated as “later,” later often never comes. The deploy goes out, the next feature becomes urgent, and suddenly you’re three months into production with accessibility issues you keep meaning to fix.

What changed the order wasn’t willpower. It was the rubric. The rubric said: accessibility is a gate. You don’t pass until it’s done. So teams did accessibility work before touching deploy configs, because the rubric made it clear that deploy without accessibility wasn’t actually “done.”

This is the thing about gates: they change sequencing by making certain paths impossible. You can tell people to prioritize accessibility. You can train them on why it matters. But if the path to production doesn’t require it, some percentage of teams will skip it—not maliciously, just because urgency pulls them toward the shortest path.

Gates change the shortest path. They make the right sequence also the easy sequence. And that matters more than any amount of exhortation.

Last thing. I keep coming back to this question of what makes a directory into a project.

I have a small configuration file that defines project identity—what task system it uses, what integrations it connects to, basic metadata. Boring stuff. But here’s what I noticed: everything else depends on that file existing. Milestone syncing. Task routing. Cross-project analysis. Documentation generation. All of it keys off that one file.

When the file doesn’t exist, the directory is just… a directory. Files in a folder. When the file exists, the directory becomes legible to the broader system. It has an identity. It can participate in workflows that span multiple projects.

This feels like a metaphor for something bigger. Organizations are full of work that exists but isn’t legible—projects that are happening but aren’t visible to the systems that allocate resources, track progress, or identify dependencies. The work is real. The impact is real. But because it doesn’t have the right metadata, the right format, the right integration points, it’s invisible to everything except the people doing it.

Making work legible isn’t bureaucracy. It’s the difference between work that can compound and work that stays isolated. The question is always: what’s the minimum viable identity that makes this work visible to the systems that matter?

So here’s what I’m sitting with: infrastructure and product work aren’t separate categories. When the tools that measure, coordinate, and make work legible move at the same speed as the work itself, they stop being overhead. They become part of how the work gets done.

The question I don’t have an answer to yet: what happens when the infrastructure that makes everything visible starts generating more work than teams can absorb? When does clarity become overwhelm?

That’s what I’m watching for this week.