Skip to main content

Hacker Laws

Hacker Laws for coders.

Conway's Law​

Any piece of software reflects the organisational communication structure that produced it.

Related to product design and the observed impact of communication structures on software output.

  • a tight-knit group with coordinated behaviour creates software with entwined features and code.
  • a more relaxed, decentralised team, meanwhile, creates more modular software.

Dunbar's Number​

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

Related to Metcalfe's and Lindy's Effect.

Eagleson's Law​

Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else.

Gall's Law​

Gall's Law states that all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked. If you want to build a complex system that works, build a simpler system first, and then improve it over time.

Knuth's Law​

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

Lindy Effect​

The Lindy Effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.

Metcalfe's Law​

According to Metcalfe's Law the value of a network is proportional to the square of its number of nodes. Computers, servers, and even users can be end nodes.

Solve the cold start problem

Miller's Number​

Miller's Number is a cognitive limit to the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory. The number is 7 ± 2.

Moore's law​

Moore's law is a term used to refer to the observation made by Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years.

Postel's Law​

Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept

Price's Law​

Price's Law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work.

Wirth's Law​

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster