It's All About Semantics

Programming exists in two worlds: the syntactic realm of compilers and the semantic realm of human understanding. While syntax gets code to run, semantics determine whether systems can evolve. Every name, abstraction, and domain boundary creates semantic contracts that either enable or constrain future development. When business concepts contaminate infrastructure layers—like introducing "squads" into an S3 client—semantic pollution occurs, creating rigid systems that resist change. Clean semantic architecture requires disciplined vocabulary, respected domain boundaries, and recognition that we're not just building software, but building languages. The words we choose today become the conceptual framework that shapes what our systems can become tomorrow.

Design Philosophy

 The New Ontology of Code

AI code generation isn't just changing how we write software—it's changing what code is. We're witnessing a fundamental inversion where code transforms from permanent artifact to regenerable output, where implementation becomes fluid while interfaces become the new bedrock. But this shift creates uncomfortable paradoxes: "easier" coding that doesn't eliminate complexity but displaces it, democratization that centralizes power, and the strange alienation of debugging code you commanded but didn't create.\r\nThis essay explores what we're really trading in this transformation—intimate understanding for broad capability, craft for productivity, independence for efficiency. Neither utopian nor dystopian, it offers language for that unsettling feeling many developers can't quite name: working with systems we control but don't comprehend. For anyone grappling with AI's impact on software, this is about recognizing the trade-offs we're making before we've made them irreversible.

AI Philosophy

 Lifespan Strategies

Mutability × Time: The Compound Risk series.
\r\nProven techniques for containing the compound risk of mutable state over time. From theoretical patterns to a successful real-world refactoring that eliminated invisible coupling.

Best Practices Design Philosophy

 Invisible Coupling

Mutability × Time: The Compound Risk series.
\r\nWhy components become secretly coupled through shared mutable state. Examines how invisible dependencies erode trust and create debugging nightmares separated by both code and time.

Best Practices Design Philosophy

 The Mutation Timeline

Mutability × Time: The Compound Risk series.
\r\nThe anatomy of object decay over time. Examines how instances progress through Birth, Initialization, Drift, Contamination, and Corruption—and why each stage compounds the previous problems.

Best Practices Design Philosophy

 The Lifespan Paradox

Mutability × Time: The Compound Risk series.
\r\nWhy longer-lived mutable instances become exponentially more dangerous over time. Explores the counterintuitive relationship between object longevity and system reliability through a real-world state management failure.

Best Practices Design Philosophy

 A philosophy of software design - John Ousterhout

I read A Philosophy of Software Design about 18 months back. It's a well-structured, concise read about managing complexity in software design. I don't think the suggested approaches are applicable in all situations (and John Ousterhout says this himself IIRC), but I recognised a lot of the problems described in the book and found it provided some useful ways to articulate concepts during code reviews (eg. whether adding a shallow function is increasing complexity in a codebase, if complexity can be pulled down into an implementation, or where it's useful to have consistency in the code).

Design Philosophy Software Development

 Evolution of software architecture

Welcome to The Pragmatic Engineer! Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Grady Booch, a true legend in software development. Grady is the Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM, where he leads groundbreaking research in embodied cognition. He’s the mind behind several object-oriented design concepts, a co-author of the Unified Modeling Language, and a founding member of the Agile Alliance and the Hillside Group. \r\n\r\nGrady has authored six books, hundreds of articles, and holds prestigious titles as an IBM, ACM, and IEEE Fellow, as well as a recipient of the Lovelace Medal (an award for those with outstanding contributions to the advancement of computing). \r\n\r\nIn this episode, we discuss:\r\n• What it means to be an IBM Fellow\r\n• The evolution of the field of software development\r\n• How UML was created, what its goals were, and why Grady disagrees with the direction of later versions of UML\r\n• Pivotal moments in software development history\r\n• How the software architect role changed over the last 50 years\r\n• Why Grady declined to be the Chief Architect of Microsoft – saying no to Bill Gates!\r\n• Grady’s take on large language models (LLMs)\r\n• Advice to less experienced software engineers\r\n• … and much more!

Architecture Philosophy Video

 Complexity Basics — Part II: Types of Systems

Abstraction Philosophy Systems

 A Philosophical Look at System Dynamics

Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, Spring of 1977. In this lecture, Donella Meadows takes on a more philosophical concept. How can we bring ourselves to be aware of the assumptions we make as systems thinkers? She asserts that models are a set of assumptions. Donella Meadows defines some of these system dynamics assumptions (such as causal relationships and feedback loops) in this video.

Abstraction Philosophy Video