“Worse is Better” by Richard P. Gabriel

Simplicity
 The design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design.
 
 Correctness
 The design must be correct in…

Doug McIlroy, The Unix Philosophy

(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features. 
 
 (ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous…

“The UNIX Philosophy” by Mike Gancarz

1. Small is beautiful.
2. Make each program do one thing well.
3. Build a prototype as soon as possible.
4. Choose portability over efficiency.
5. Store data in flat text files.

Simplicity

XP teams prefer simple solutions where possible. Here are four criteria used to evaluate the simplicity of a design:

1. Appropriate for the intended audience.It doesn’t matter how brilliant and elegant a piece of design is; if the people who need to work with it don’t understand it, it…

Making Making Manifesto

tl;dr Work towards more production-like feedback sooner
 
 Engineers make stuff. Considerable thought goes into the stuff we make: designs, prototypes, focus groups, early testers, analytics, A/B tests. Engineers make something else, though, something that gets less thought. We make the…

The Two Ways of Software Design (guest post by Roy van de Water)

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies; the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method…