Privacy-first mind mapping app. Part 6: Maintainability and Coding Rules

This is the chapter where I admit something simple: clean code talks are nice, but products are built in history, not in slides. When MindMapVault was small, I could hold most of it in my head. Then the project grew into frontend work, desktop work, encryption flows, uploads, backend routes, different database paths, deployment scripts, release notes, and a lot of "just fix this one thing" days. That is when coding rules stopped being theory and became survival. The rules I kept coming back to w