Fundamentals Will Help You Survive the Constant Acceleration of Software Engineering

About this episode

Fundamentals get talked about constantly, but rarely defined. In this episode I dig into what a fundamental actually is — the building blocks, heuristics, and core characteristics that don't change — and why they matter more than ever in a profession where abstraction moves faster than almost anywhere else. If you feel like you can't keep up with every new framework, model, or tool release, the answer isn't to read faster. It's to step up a level. Fundamentals get talked about constantly — in sports, in hobbies, in software — but we rarely stop to define what one actually is. In today's episode, I unpack what makes something fundamental, why software engineering in particular buries its fundamentals under layer after layer of abstraction, and how principles-first thinking gives you a way to keep up with an industry that never stops moving without needing to learn every single new thing that ships. • What Actually Counts as a Fundamental: Fundamentals aren't rules — they're building blocks, behaviors, habit patterns, and heuristics. In basketball it's dribbling. In football it's blocking. In software it's readability, reliability, the setup-execute-teardown shape of a test, bas