“Consistency” Does Not Mean “Uniformity”
In a user interface, similar things should look the same. But different things should look different. Why do over 75% of Facebook’s users think that the new Facebook UI is bad? Because it makes...
View ArticleThe Secret of Success: Suck Less
When I started working on Bugzilla in 2004, it was a difficult time for the whole project. There were tremendous problems with the code, we hadn’t gotten a major release out in two years, and a lot of...
View ArticleHow We Figured Out What Sucked
So, after my last post, a few people asked, “Okay, but how do you figure out what sucks?” Well, some of it’s really obvious. You press a button and the program takes 10 minutes to respond. That sucks...
View ArticleThe Engineer Attitude
The attitude that every engineer should have, in every field of engineering, is: I can solve this problem the right way. Whatever the problem is, there’s always a right way to solve it. The right way...
View ArticleThe Singular Secret of the Rockstar Programmer
Before all the laws of software, before the purpose of software, before the science of software design itself, there is a singular fact that determines the success or failure of a software developer....
View ArticleWhy Programmers Suck
A long time ago, I wrote an essay called “Why Computers Suck” (it was given the title “Computers” and “What’s Wrong With Computers” in two later revisions, and the original title never saw the light...
View ArticlePrivacy, Simplified
So, there’s a lot of talk on the Internet about privacy. Some people say that privacy is only desired by those who have something to hide. Some people insist that privacy is a human right that should...
View ArticleThe Equation of Software Design
So today I was playing around with a little equation that may in fact explain nearly all of the principles of software design. I don’t know that it’s actually mathematically solvable in terms of...
View ArticleSoftware Design, In Two Sentences
In the context of The Equation of Software Design, it is now possible to reduce the primary principles of software design into just two statements: It is more important to reduce the Effort of...
View ArticleBefore You Begin….
One of the major goals that I have with researching software design is the hope that we can take people who are “bad programmers” or mediocre programmers and, with some simple education and only a...
View ArticleThe Power Of No
How many times have you used a piece of software that was full of incredibly convoluted features, strange decisions, and unusable interfaces? Have you ever wanted to physically or verbally abuse a...
View ArticleReadability and Naming Things
Many people think that the readability of code has to do with the letters and symbols used. They believe it is the adding, removing, or changing of those symbols that makes code more readable. In some...
View ArticleOpen Source Community, Simplified
Growing and maintaining an open-source community depends essentially on three things: Getting people interested in contributing Removing the barriers to entering the project and contributing Retaining...
View ArticleDeveloper Hubris
Your program is not important to me. I don’t care about its user interface. I don’t care what its name is. I don’t care that you made it, or what version it is. The only thing I care about is that your...
View ArticleClues to Complexity
Here are some clues that tell you that your code may be too complex: You have to add “hacks” to make things keep working. Other developers keep asking you how some part of the code works. Other...
View ArticleCode Simplicity: The Science of Software Development
What if every software developer could gain the knowledge of long experience without having to go through the pain of repeated failure? What if, instead of being a continuous chaos of complexity and...
View ArticleSoftware as Knowledge
I don’t often dive deep into the philosophical underpinnings of Code Simplicity, but I’ve been realizing more and more that there are a few philosophical principles behind the writings that would be...
View ArticleCode Simplicity, Second Revision
In June, I released a second revision of Code Simplicity. Some of you probably already know, but I thought that I should let everybody else know, too. The most important change is that book gets into...
View ArticleThe Accuracy of Future Predictions
One thing we know about software design is that the future is important. However, we also know that the future is very hard to predict. I think that I have come up with a way to explain exactly how...
View ArticleUsers Have Problems, Developers Have Solutions
In the world of software, it is the job of software developers to solve the problems of users. Users present a problem, and the developers solve it. Whenever these roles are reversed, trouble ensues....
View ArticleThe Philosophy of Testing
Much like we gain knowledge about the behavior of the physical universe via the scientific method, we gain knowledge about the behavior of our software via a system of assertion, observation, and...
View ArticleMake It Never Come Back
When solving a problem in a codebase, you’re not done when the symptoms stop. You’re done when the problem has disappeared and will never come back. It’s very easy to stop solving a problem when it no...
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The Secret of Fast Programming: Stop Thinking
When I talk to developers about code complexity, they often say that they want to write simple code, but deadline pressure or underlying issues mean that they just don’t have the time or knowledge...
View ArticleThe Purpose of Technology
In general, when technology attempts to solve problems of matter, energy, space, or time, it is successful. When it attempts to solve human problems of the mind, communication, ability, etc. it fails...
View ArticleTest-Driven Development and the Cycle of Observation
Today there was an interesting discussion between Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and David Heinemeier Hansson on the nature and use of Test-Driven Development (TDD), where one writes tests first and then...
View ArticleHow to Handle Code Complexity in a Software Company
Here’s an obvious statement that has some subtle consequences: Only an individual programmer can resolve code complexity. That is, resolving code complexity requires the attention of an individual...
View ArticleTwo is Too Many
There is a key rule that I personally operate by when I’m doing incremental development and design, which I call “two is too many.” It’s how I implement the “be only as generic as you need to be” rule...
View ArticleMeasuring Developer Productivity
Almost as long as I have been working to make the lives of software engineers better, people have been asking me how to measure developer productivity. How do we tell where there are productivity...
View ArticleEffective Engineering Productivity
Often, people who work on engineering productivity either come into conflict with the developers they are attempting to help, or spend a long time working on some project that ends up not mattering...
View ArticleRefactoring is About Features
There’s a point that I made in the book but which I have had to point out to people a few times since then, and so I wanted to emphasize it a bit more. When you clean up code, you are always doing it...
View ArticleThe Fundamental Philosophy of Debugging
Sometimes people have a very hard time debugging. Mostly, these are people who believe that in order to debug a system, you have to think about it instead of looking at it. Let me give you an example...
View ArticleKindness and Code
It is very easy to think of software development as being an entirely technical activity, where humans don’t really matter and everything is about the computer. However, the opposite is actually true....
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Understanding Software
Hey everybody. I’ve published a new book! It’s called Understanding Software. The book contains all of the content that I’ve written on software development and working in teams since the publication...
View ArticleHow to be a Great Programmer: Awareness, Understanding, and Responsibility
There are three key factors to being or becoming a great programmer: awareness, understanding, and responsibility. I’ve talked a lot about the subject of understanding. Heck, I even named my most...
View ArticleHow to Learn to Program
One question that people ask me all the time is, “How do I become a programmer?” Or, “How do I learn to program?” There are a lot of possible answers to this, depending on the person and how you want...
View ArticleFires vs. Strategy
There’s a point that I’ve been making to engineers recently that I realized would be valuable if shared more widely. When you do engineering work, there are different types of tasks that get given to...
View ArticleThe Definition of Simplicity
Many years ago, I wrote a blog post explaining what was wrong with computers, and essentially saying the problem was complexity. Several years after that, I published Code Simplicity, which was...
View ArticleReasoning and Choice
One of the most important properties about any software system is the ability to understand what it is going to do without having to run it. This concept is usually referred to as the ability to...
View ArticleWhat is a Monorepo, Really?
There are often discussions at software companies about whether they should or shouldn’t have a “monorepo,” meaning “a single, version-controlled repository for all code at the company.” Very often,...
View ArticleCode Simplicity: The Fundamentals of Software is Now Free
About a year ago, a Twitter user tagged me and some other programming authors in a thread where they described the barriers to accessing computer programming books in their country. I’ve been made...
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