Words you know: complete the sentences

guardrails · take stock · let your guard down · listening tour · belittle

• As the new engineering director in Chicago, Mary went on a ____ to understand everyone's pain points.
• Before making any major changes to our Denver codebase, we need to ____ of all our current cloud assets.
• The senior architect in Boston is always trying to ____ our junior engineers' ideas, which destroys their confidence.
• To help our Seattle developers experiment safely, we established clear technical ____ so they wouldn't break the main branch.
• You should never ____ when deploying on a Friday afternoon, or you might end up working all weekend.

Remember: Unreal past: it's (high) time, would rather, as if / as though, suppose / what if + past

• It is high time we [decompose / decomposed] our legacy monolith in London.
• I would rather you [didn't write / don't write] tightly coupled code for the Denver system.
• The Seattle team talks as if they [run / ran] a flawless distributed system, but it fails daily.
• Suppose we [split / will split] the user service tomorrow, what would happen to the Chicago database?

Remember: Habits and annoying behaviour: will / would, be always + -ing, keep (on) + -ing

• The Dallas team [is always complaining / complains always] about network latency.
• Back in 2022, the developers in London [would deploy / will deploy] updates directly to production without testing.
• They [keep on / will keep on] adding new features instead of untangling the big ball of mud.
• Even when we explain the risks of premature optimization, he [will over-engineer / shall over-engineer] every single service.

Sources: photo by PNW Production on Pexels