# Competing against yesterday

By Valentin Galfré · Published 2026-09-09 · 3 min read · https://galfrevn.com/writing/competing-against-yesterday

> Being competitive without stepping on anyone. The only useful comparison is with your own system from last week.

I am competitive. I always want to win. Ask anyone who has queued ranked with me, or reviewed a benchmark I ran.

For a long time I treated that as something to manage. Competitive people are supposed to be difficult, and engineering is supposed to be collaborative. It took me a while to notice that the problem was never the competitiveness. It was the opponent.

## The wrong opponent

Competing against the person next to you has a ceiling: you stop when you pass them. It has a cost: they notice, and now you have a rivalry where you needed a teammate. And it has a lie built in: their score says nothing about whether your system is any good. It says you are ahead of one other person, on one metric, today.

Competing against a benchmark is better, but a benchmark does not know your constraints. It does not know you have three engineers, a legacy queue and a launch on Thursday.

There is one opponent who knows exactly what you were working with, has the same constraints, and is available every morning.

## Yesterday

Yesterday's system is the only fair comparison. Same team, same codebase, same budget, one day less of knowing better.

Is the p95 lower than it was? Is the build faster? Are there fewer flaky tests, fewer casts, fewer places where the type says one thing and the code does another? Did I understand something today that I only copied yesterday?

If the answer is yes, I won. Nobody had to lose.

## What this does to a team

It turns out that the competitive instinct, pointed at yesterday, is exactly what you want in a room full of engineers. Everyone can win at once. Nobody's improvement costs anyone else's. The person who was slowest last week can have the best delta this week, and the delta is what we celebrate.

It also makes the standards conversation easier. Higher standards than yesterday is a bar everyone can see and nobody can argue with, because yesterday is not a person and does not get defensive.

> **Rule.** Measure the delta, not the position. Positions are about other people. Deltas are about the work.

## Where it came from

I grew up assembling and selling refurbished computers in Santa Fe. Every machine was a small competition against the one before it: quieter, faster, cleaner cables. Then it was ranked queues, where the level number goes up only if you do. Then it was software, where there is always a graph, and the graph always has a yesterday.

The instinct never changed. I just stopped aiming it at people.

## Not in a bad way

When I say I am competitive, I usually add "not in a bad way", and I used to think that was an apology. It is a description. The good way is the one where the only person who has to be worse than you is the person you were on Tuesday.

> Faster systems, cleaner abstractions, higher standards than yesterday. That is the whole competition, and it is the only one with no losers.