One piece of common wisdom that I've come to disagree with is "do the most complicated thing first." In a waterfall world, that's a risk-reduction strategy, but in an incremental development context, it's actually the opposite.
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Let's talk about the cost of a stand-up meeting.

Here in the SF-Bay Area, A senior programmer can make $300K/year or more. Starting salaries are more around $175K. Let's average at $250K to make the math easy.

Your cost to the company is higher than that.
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That is, continuous review is better than what amounts to a waterfall review phase. For one thing, the reviewer has a vested interest in assuring that the code they're about to use is high quality.
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Refactoring isn’t optional. I hear teams talk about "refactoring sprints" or treating it as a luxury. That’s completely backwards.

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Budgeting around projects is usually a bad idea. You'll be paying your engineers, even if they're sitting around playing canasta, so why not budget accordingly? Create a budget for the entire engineering department (fully loaded salary * some multiplier for expenses). There. You're done.
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Most people who call me misguided, crazy, or an idiot when I point out that we don't need estimates are effectively saying, "Estimates are an essential part of the way I work." I don't doubt it. Perhaps you should reconsider the way you work? 😄
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Feature branching is a lie we tell ourselves.

It feels safer and more controlled, but in reality, it’s slowing you down, increasing risk, and making your integration problems someone else’s future nightmare.

"That is why Elon’s commission looks, sounds, and smells like a sham. Because thus far, the biggest beneficiaries aren’t working class Americans, but rather Elon Musk himself. You don’t get credit for rooting out abuse if your execution raises more questions than it answers."

You have no idea how sick I've gotten of people taking technical terms (e.g., TDD) and perverting them to mean something else entirely. They claim that the term can mean whatever the hell they want it to mean and that there are "many definitions," all valid. That's nonsense.
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