IDRs as Records of Intent(wrla.ch)
13 points by evakhoury | 1 comments
Blog post on the wlach log arguing that implementation decision records (IDRs) serve as records of intent in software development.
#software-design on Hacker News
24 stories tagged software-design, newest first.
Personal Computing 2.0: It's time for a personal computing revolution(ideas.imbue.com)
12 points by raybb | 2 comments
An essay by Josh Albrecht on Imbue's Substack arguing for a new personal computing revolution that restores user control, free of subscriptions, ads and dark patterns.
Dear Software Makers(blog.jim-nielsen.com)
74 points by speckx | 46 comments
Jim Nielsen blog post responding to Marques Brownlee's "Dear YouTube" video on YouTube's A/B test video variants and what it means for software makers.
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps (2025)(inkandswitch.com)
144 points by evakhoury | 69 comments
Ink & Switch essay (June 2025) envisioning malleable software that users can reshape to their needs, and the barriers in today's computing stack to achieving it.
Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)(sandimetz.com)
497 points by rafaepta | 318 comments
Sandi Metz's blog post "The Wrong Abstraction" argues that duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction and explains how bad abstractions accumulate.
Learning Software Architecture(matklad.github.io)
526 points by surprisetalk | 107 comments
Blog post by matklad, written as a reply to a researcher physicist, offering advice on learning software design and architecture skills, mainly by doing.
The peril of laziness lost(bcantrill.dtrace.org)
420 points by gpm | 136 comments
Bryan Cantrill blog essay on Larry Wall's programmer virtue of laziness and the risks to software design when that laziness is lost.
Good software knows when to stop(ogirardot.writizzy.com)
519 points by ssaboum | 261 comments
Blog post by Olivier Girardot arguing that good software should know when to stop adding features, opening with a hypothetical surprising change to the ls command.
Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale(maggieappleton.com)
380 points by pavel_lishin | 399 comments
Maggie Appleton's digital garden note on Gas Town's agent orchestration patterns, design and critical thinking as bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale.
C Is Best (2025)(sqlite.org)
341 points by alexpadula | 407 comments
SQLite documentation page explaining why SQLite is implemented in C and why there are no plans to rewrite it in another language.
Users only care about 20% of your application(idiallo.com)
367 points by jnord | 174 comments
Blog post by Ibrahim Diallo arguing that users only use about 20% of an application's features, illustrated with Excel.
Cognitive load is what matters(github.com)
1392 points by nromiun | 488 comments
GitHub repository by zakirullin containing an essay arguing that reducing cognitive load is what matters most in software development, with translations.
Do the simplest thing that could possibly work(seangoedecke.com)
1015 points by dondraper36 | 364 comments
Blog post by Sean Goedecke arguing engineers should understand the current system deeply and then do the simplest thing that could possibly work.
Making Software(makingsoftware.com)
631 points by calme_toi | 95 comments
Making Software is an illustrated reference manual by Dan Hollick explaining how software and computing concepts work, aimed at people who design and build software.
Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design(github.com)
404 points by recursivedoubts | 411 comments
GitHub README transcribing a series of discussions between Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin and John Ousterhout comparing Clean Code with A Philosophy of Software Design.
Software Design Is Knowledge Building(olano.dev)
373 points by signa11 | 97 comments
Blog post on olano.dev arguing that software design is a process of building knowledge, illustrated by a generic true story about a company's integration service.
That's not an abstraction, that's a layer of indirection(fhur.me)
546 points by fagnerbrack | 213 comments
A blog post arguing that many so-called abstractions in codebases are merely layers of indirection that add complexity and hurt performance without real value.
Cognitive load is what matters(minds.md)
1649 points by zdw | 685 comments
An essay by Zakirullin arguing that reducing developers' cognitive load should be the main goal when writing and designing software.
Engineering for Slow Internet(brr.fyi)
927 points by jader201 | 363 comments
A blog post from brr.fyi, written from Antarctica, on how software and websites behave on slow, high-latency internet and how engineers should design for it.
Don't DRY Your Code Prematurely(testing.googleblog.com)
690 points by thunderbong | 368 comments
Google Testing Blog "Code Health" post arguing against applying Don't Repeat Yourself too early, since premature abstractions make future changes harder.
Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”(ntietz.com)
560 points by tambourine_man | 308 comments
Blog post arguing that the ambiguous term "auth" should be replaced with "login" for authentication and "permissions" for authorization.
S3 is files, but not a filesystem(calpaterson.com)
535 points by todsacerdoti | 400 comments
Cal Paterson's essay on why Amazon S3 stores files but isn't a filesystem, discussing deep modules, mismatched interfaces, and why SAP is painful.
Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)(factoryfactoryfactory.net)
583 points by jameslk | 326 comments
A republished copy of Benji Smith's 2005 satirical essay "Why I Hate Frameworks," using a hammer-factory analogy to mock over-engineered software frameworks.
Imaginary problems are the root of bad software(cerebralab.com)
834 points by deofoo | 358 comments
Blog essay on Cerebralab arguing that bad software stems from developers solving imaginary problems rather than real user needs.