Over the past few years, we have been so focused on worrying about the future of our own profession that most of us have failed to notice the most important thing that s about to happen: Everybody will be able to write software. This isn t a theoretical idea. There are already people in HR, Finance, and Sales at companies across the world using AI assistants to write complete computer programs.…
As I write this, it s the start of 2026 and many people are in a crisis about what their job is. If AI writes all the code, am I still an engineer? Will the world still need software engineers? What really is an engineer, anyway? Really, all of this comes down to that last question: what really is an engineer, anyway? Well, I have an answer for that that I think will help bring clarity to a lot of…
In the field of software engineering, we often talk about using or building a platform. Let s talk about what that really means and the principles for how to build a great platform. What is a Platform? Sometimes people think of a platform as being a thing a lot of people use or a system built by one team that is depended on by a lot of other teams. I have a more nuanced definition that I think…
I ve been working for over 20 years in the field of developer experience, where we help developers be more effective, efficient, and happy, by improving tools, systems, and processes. I have been intimately involved in designing key aspects of the developer experience at Google and LinkedIn, have been very involved with the research community in this space, and I m constantly in touch with…
Sometimes, I have to explain software development to people who are not software developers. Over the years, I have come up with an analogy that explains what software development is like and its processes. I have successfully used it to explain software development to a 9-year-old kid, including advanced concepts like cybersecurity and so forth. I figure others might benefit from it, so here it…
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 distantly aware of these problems before there are many countries in the world where the cost of a book in USD could be a person s entire weekly salary. I didn t write any of my books to make money I…
I have now worked in developer productivity organizations at a company with a very advanced mono-repo (Google) and a company with a very advanced multi-repo system (LinkedIn), and I have to tell you: most of the valuable properties that people associate with a mono-repo have nothing to do with how many source control repositories you have. In fact, what people (and Google) consider a mono-repo is…
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 reason about the system. Basically, you want to make statements about the structures, actions, and results of the system without having to see them in action first. To understand why this is important,…
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 essentially a thesis describing how and why simplicity was the most important quality of software. Many years after that, I was sitting in a room of some of the world s most experienced software engineers,…
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 you. Some tasks are emergencies or short-term work. We sometimes call this putting out fires, especially when the work relates to handling something that is urgently broken or immediately needed…
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 to go about it. I figured that since people ask me this so often, I had better finally write an article about it. Find the Best Way One rule that has served me well when I ve been learning to program, no…
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 recent book Understanding Software. In particular, I ve pointed out many times that the better you understand something, the better you will do it. However, there are two other factors that go along with…
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 of Code Simplicity, plus some entirely new content that s never been published anywhere. In fact, it contains one of my favorite essays that I ever wrote from back in 2008 but never published before.…
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. Software engineering is fundamentally a human discipline. Many of the mistakes made over the years in trying to fix software development have been made by focusing purely on the technical aspects of…
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 of what I mean. Let s say you have a web server that is silently failing to serve pages to users 5% of the time. What is your reaction to this question: Why? Do you immediately try to come up with…
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 in the service of the product. Refactoring is essentially an organizational process (not the definition of organizational meaning having to do with a business but the definition meaning having to do…
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 because nobody actually cares about it. This comes about because the problem that you see that a development team has is not necessarily the problem that they know exists. For example, you could come…
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 problems? How do we know if a team is doing worse or better over time? How does a manager explain to senior managers how productive the developers are? And so on and so on. In general, I tended to focus…
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 from the Three Flaws of Software Design. Essentially, I know exactly how generic my code needs to be by noticing that I m tempted to cut and paste some code, and then instead of cutting and pasting it,…
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 person on that code. They can certainly use appropriate tools to make the task easier, but ultimately it s the application of human intelligence, attention, and work that simplifies code. So what? Why…
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 writes code. Each participant in the conversation had different personal preferences for how they write code, which makes sense. However, from each participant s personal preference you could extract…
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 or backfires dangerously. For example, the Internet handled a great problem of space it allowed us to communicate with anybody in the world, instantly. However, it did not make us better…
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 necessary to both complete the task and refine it to simplicity. Well, it s certainly true that putting time pressure on developers tends to lead to them writing complex code. However, deadlines don t…
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 longer has any visible symptoms. You ve fixed the bug, nobody is complaining, and there seem to be other pressing issues. So why continue to do work on it? It s fine for now, right? No. Remember that…
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 experimentation called testing. There are many things one could desire to know about a software system. It seems that most often we want to know if it actually behaves like we intended it to behave. That…
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. If you ever want to see a bloated, useless, complex piece of software, find one where the developers implemented every solution that any user ever suggested. It s true that the users are the people…
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 hard it is to predict the future of software. The most basic version of this theory is: The accuracy of future predictions decreases relative to the complexity of the system and the distance into the…
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 the laws and rules of software design much more quickly now. It starts with a completely re-written Preface that tells the story of how I developed the principles in Code Simplicity, and why you might…
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 valuable to share. Also, some of these philosophies haven t been fully formed until I sat with the work for a long time, applied it in a lot of situations, and talked about it with many people. This…
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 argument, the process of software development could be a sane, orderly progression that was well-understood by every single programmer involved? What if all programmers and their managers shared a…
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 developers keep mis-using your code, and causing bugs. Reading a line of code takes longer than an instant for an experienced developer. You feel scared to modify this part of the code. Management seriously…
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 program helps me accomplish my purpose. That s a truly remarkable feat, and if your program does it, you should be proud. There s no need to make your program take up more of my attention just…
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 contributors so that they keep contributing If you can get people interested, then have them actually contribute, and then have them stick around, you have a community. Otherwise, you don t. If you…
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 sense, they re right. However, the underlying principle is: Readability of code depends primarily on how space is occupied by letters and symbols. What does that mean? Well, it means two things: Code…
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 computer because it just wouldn t do things right, or you couldn t figure out how to make it function properly? And how often have you thought, How could any programmer think this was a sane idea? Well…
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 little experience, bring them into being good programmers or great programmers. I want to know what are the fundamental things you have to teach somebody to make them into a great programmer? What if…
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 Maintenance than it is to reduce the Effort of Implementation. The Effort of Maintenance is proportional to the complexity of the system. And that is pretty much it. If all you knew about 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 numbers, but it does demonstrate the factors present in software development decisions and how they relate to each other. Before I go into the equation, though, I have to define the factors that are…
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 never be violated without consent. There s only one problem with this whole debate: what is privacy, and why would anybody want it? This is rarely defined most people just seem to assume that…
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 of day). The article was fairly long, but it basically came down to the idea that computers suck because programmers create crazy complicated stuff that nobody else can understand, and complexity builds on…