The thing I’ve learned about building: most of it happens before I touch a keyboard.

A little backstory goes a long way! 😊

🧑‍💻: I am an IT professional by trade, but I am a passionate, purposeful FSD by choice, and somewhere in between that, I’m trying to raise a daughter and to be a present husband to a woman I’ve been married to for the last 17 years.

📊 & 🚙: My day job is a 60hr a week role, with a 20 hour a week commute, that’s 80hrs every week…

So why am I telling you this? 👇

I have been asked a few times about my schedule, people ask how I get anything built. The honest answer is I think about it longer than I work on it.

✅ The Answer:

1️⃣ My default mode is the 7Ps: Prior Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

😅 It sounds like a bumper sticker until you actually live by it.

Before I build a feature, write a spec, or kick off a project, I sit with it.

❓What’s the real problem?

❔Who’s the actual user (human or AI)?

❓What breaks at scale?

❔What does the schema need to look like in a year, not a sprint?

Most of the bad code I’ve seen (and written 😅), came from skipping that quiet hour at the front.

🕯️My Takeaway: Plan properly and the build almost writes itself.

❌. Skip it and you’ll pay for it three times over in cleanup.

2️⃣ The second mental model I lean on hard:

✅ Verify before you assert.

I don’t let myself or AI make confident claims without checking. Even when “My Skills” or “AI Skills” or “My Skills with AI” are good.

💡Most bugs, bad decisions, and broken trust come from someone (often me) being sure about something they didn’t actually look at.

Confidence without verification feels great, until it doesn’t.

So, I build visibility into my work by verifying and in turn, it changes how I work with AI, how I write specs, and how I run my team.

3️⃣ The third one is quieter:

🚙 Long commutes are not wasted time.

🧠 20hrs a week, you best believe I do my best thinking in the car.

Voice conversations, no screen, no Slack. The work I ship on weekends is almost always shaped by something I figured out on the I-15.

💡So when people ask me “How did you build that, or How did you build that so fast?” I’m not the best builder, I’m not a fast builder. I’m just a deliberate one. I’d rather lock five architectural decisions cleanly than ship ten features I’ll regret in a month.

🤔💭

I am curious where you all land on this.

What’s a mental model you rely on that doesn’t show up in your code or your output, but quietly shapes everything you make?

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