Four principles of software engineering October 9, 2020 on Drew DeVault's blog

Software should be robust. It should be designed to accommodate all known edge cases. In practice, this means predicting and handling all known error cases, enumerating and addressing all classes of user inputs, reasoning about and planning for the performance characteristics of your program, and so on.

Software should be reliable. It should be expected to work for an extended length of time under design conditions without failures. Ideally, it should work outside of design conditions up to some threshold.

Software should also be stable. It should not change in incompatible or unexpected ways; if it works today it should also work tomorrow. If it has to change, a plan shall be written. Stakeholders (including users!) should be given advance notice and should be involved in the planning stage.

Finally, software should be simple. Only as many moving parts should be included as necessary to meet the other three goals. All software has bugs, but complicated software (1) has more bugs and (2) is more difficult to diagnose and fix. Note that designing a simple solution is usually more difficult than designing a complex solution.

This (short) article is based on a Mastodon post I wrote a few weeks ago.

Articles from blogs I read Generated by openring

Bits about Money yearly recap and plans

What we covered in 2024, what are plans are in 2025, and a solicitation for supporting memberships.

via Bits about Money January 15, 2025

Summary of changes for December 2024

Hey everyone!This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of December. Summary Of Changes 100r.co, updated the documentation for our various projects. Left, added support for unicode input(Mastodon). Rabbit Waves, …

via Hundred Rabbits January 1, 2025

Status update December 2024

Hey you, it's been a while. How are you? Fine, thanks! Here are some quick updates, and personal news. Last year I was unemployed, but now I have much less time doing free software. For the most part, I've been continuing being around projects I lo…

via Willow's feed December 30, 2024