About 36 results
https://jacob.blog/notes/conways-law · 28 May 2023
System boundaries tend to follow communication boundaries. Plan for that or pay in meetings and glue code.
https://jacob.blog/notes/yagni · 10 Oct 2022
Defer capabilities until need is proven; speculative code costs build time, calendar time, and carry weight in the codebase.
https://jacob.blog/notes/galls-law · 11 Sep 2022
Working complex systems started as working simple systems
https://jacob.blog/notes/hicks-law · 7 Jul 2022
Why choice reaction time scales with the log of alternatives, and what that buys you in menus, settings, and incident tooling.
https://jacob.blog/notes/unix-philosophy · 14 Apr 2022
McIlroy's pipes-and-tools rules still explain good CLIs and composable services, even when the universal interface is JSON.
https://jacob.blog/notes/occams-razor · 3 Mar 2022
Why the familiar razor about unnecessary entities is sharper as a habit of work than as a slogan, across code, debugging, and ML.
https://jacob.blog/notes/amdahls-law · 14 Feb 2022
Why parallel hardware stops helping once a fixed slice of work stays serial.
https://jacob.blog/notes/dunning-kruger-effect · 9 Jan 2022
What Kruger and Dunning measured in their studies, why the pop account misleads teams, and how to run reviews and hiring without treating confidence as a personality probe.
https://jacob.blog/notes/parkinsons-law · 11 Nov 2021
Why slack in a deadline often turns into scope, polish, and meetings instead of safety margin.
https://jacob.blog/notes/cunninghams-law · 14 Oct 2021
Why wrong claims draw corrections faster than plain questions, and why the famous line is a shaky match for Ward Cunningham's own story.