architecture Essential Reading: A Philosophy of Software Design — Fighting Complexity One Module at a Time josedacruz, September 30, 2026September 30, 2026 TL;DR: John Ousterhout argues that software complexity doesn’t arrive as one big mistake — it accumulates in small increments, one shortcut at a time, until a codebase becomes hard to change without breaking something else. His fix is to design “deep” modules: pieces of code with a simple interface that… Continue Reading
architecture Essential Reading: The Mythical Man-Month — Why Adding People to a Late Project Makes It Later josedacruz, September 23, 2026September 23, 2026 TL;DR: When a software project falls behind, the instinctive fix is to throw more people at it. Fred Brooks spent a career learning why that instinct is wrong, and wrote it down so the rest of us wouldn’t have to relearn it the expensive way. For anyone who plans, staffs,… Continue Reading
architecture Essential Reading: Normal Accidents — Why Complex, Tightly Coupled Systems Fail by Design josedacruz, September 18, 2026September 18, 2026 TL;DR: Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents argues that in sufficiently complex, tightly-connected systems, catastrophic failures aren’t rare flukes caused by bad luck or careless operators — they are a structural inevitability the system was built to eventually produce. For anyone running distributed systems, that reframes “we had an outage” from a… Continue Reading