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

The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess

In my free time, I help run a small Mastodon server for roughly six hundred queer leatherfolk. When a new member signs up, we require them to write a short application—just a sentence or two. There’s a small text box in the signup form which says: Please t…

via Aphyr: Posts July 7, 2025

Raised Catholic

My introduction to CatholicismIn my young life, I was quite involved in Catholicism. I was raised this way by my mother, who wholeheartedly believes in it. In contrast, my father is not religious, and only goes to church for special occasions like the Chr…

via Cadence's Weblog July 6, 2025

Hare 0.25.2 released

I am pleased to announce the release of Hare 0.25.2 today. 🎉 It has been almost one year since the previous release, Hare 0.24.2, and the new release is packed with the numerous language features, standard libarary features, and countless bugfixes and small…

via Blogs on The Hare programming language June 21, 2025