When you start as a junior developer, you think software engineering is about writing code. A few years in, you think it's about choosing the right architecture and frameworks. After ten-plus years in the trenches - shipping features, surviving on-call disasters, and watching "perfect" codebases turn into unmaintainable monsters - you realize the truth: Software engineering is mostly about managing complexity, human communication, and trade-offs. Here are 25 mistakes I made, witnessed,...