First week of Byte-Sized Tech

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It has been a week since I announced my telegram channel byte-sized tech.

My main goal in creating this channel was to read tech books. I wanted to summarize them to avoid just skimming.

It hasn’t gained much traffic yet. But, I hope it will resonate with more people so that I feel even more socially accountable to continue this.

I have read and summarized the first eight chapters of A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout.

Chapters 7 and 8 need some editing. So, I’ll upload them in a few days. Get them first on my channel.

To convince you to join, I have further summarized the first eight chapters in two sentences.

  1. The essence of software design is to minimize complexity, which is caused by dependencies and obscurity. Complexity builds up slowly, and the solution is to adopt a zero-tolerance philosophy towards it.

  2. Balancing tactical vs. strategic development is crucial. Strategic thinking, which requires 10-20% investment, focuses on creating good design to prevent complexity from growing.

  3. Modules should expose simple interfaces while hiding most of the complexity. Deep modules provide significant functionality with minimal interface complexity.

  4. Reduce complexity by hiding unnecessary details within modules. Avoid information leakage where many modules depend on the same implementation detail.

  5. Aim for “somewhat” general-purpose modules. They should be simple and cover current needs. Avoid unnecessary complexity.

  6. Remove layers that don’t add value. Avoid pass-through methods and pass-through variables to simplify interfaces and responsibilities.

  7. Modules should handle more complexity themselves to keep their interfaces simple. Simplifying for users at the expense of more complexity inside the module leads to cleaner designs.

The full summaries are available on byte-sized tech — join us :)

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DISCLAIMER: NO LLM SUMMARIES