Comparison
One-way doorvsTwo-way door
One-way door
you picked the customer-facing URL scheme, and two years of links mean it is never changing.
A decision that is expensive or impossible to reverse once made: a public API shape, a data model that customers now hold copies of, a vendor with your data in it, an organisational split. These deserve slow, senior, written consideration precisely because the cost of being wrong is permanent. The mistake teams make is not distinguishing them, so one-way doors get waved through in standup and two-way doors get three weeks of review.
Full entry →Two-way door
you argued for a week about a library you could have swapped out in an afternoon.
A decision you can walk back cheaply if it turns out wrong. Most decisions are these, and treating them as if they were not is the most common way engineering organisations become slow. The correct handling is to decide quickly, at the lowest sensible level, and spend the saved deliberation on the small number of decisions that are actually one-way.
Full entry →