Naming, versioning and the few rules that are not negotiable.
One word, lowercase, a verb or an agent noun. No prefixes, no team names, no project codenames — those outlive their teams and stop meaning anything.
Releases are YYYY.M.N where N resets each month. This is
not semantic versioning and is not pretending to be; it answers "when"
rather than "how compatible", and compatibility is stated per
change.
Additive changes ship without ceremony. Removals get a deprecation window with a stated end date, and the end date is honoured. A schema version that is "accepted" is accepted until the date on the page, not until someone complains.
UTC everywhere, in storage, in logs and in schedules. Local time is computed at the point of display and nowhere else.
Console