Project considerations

Above all else, it has to work.

System design hints. Elegant and simple design.

• Keep it simple (stupid), don’t be Richard Hendricks from Silicon Valley trying to explain electrons to a user. Sometimes the strawman or brute force solution is good enough.

• Fail faster, build one design to throw it away, you arent going to get it right the first time. Google spends years getting things wrong too (it took them ~seven years to make Google Spanner).

A summary of Butler Lampson’s original paper

2 Functionality

2.1: Keep it simple

• Do one thing at a time, do it well. Make small, working, effective interfaces, they are contracts, don’t try to do too much, don’t generalize.

• Get it right.

• Write specifications (then implement), document the abstract functionality provided by your application and its interfaces.

2.2: Corollaries

• Make it fast rather than general or powerful.

• Don’t hide the power of the interface, clients should know what it does well.