42. Intro to Design Principles
When we’re new, we tend to write code in a “code-first” style—just get it working! Over time, we notice that:
- It’s hard to test because code is tangled.
- We duplicate logic across classes and modules.
- New features are painful to add.
Design principles step in as mental guardrails, ensuring we keep our code easy to change and reason about. They embody a constant tension: we don’t want to over-engineer (spending too long “perfecting” abstractions) nor under-engineer (piling hacks that hamper future development). By following principles like SOLID or DRY, we find a middle ground…
Howdy 👋
This is an online wiki about the main topics over the last 40 years of software design, architecture & testing. It was created by Khalil Stemmler.
This wiki's mission is to help eliminate the unknown unknowns, helping you get up to speed on the best practices and principles to write testable, flexible, and maintainable code.
I created this wiki while I was connecting the dots on my own path. You can read more about that learning journey in the introduction
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You can read the intro to the book for free and visit solidbook.io to buy the book/wiki! To get an idea of my writing, read some of my best free content here and here.
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