README

hacker-laws
🧠 Laws, Theories, Principles and Patterns for developers and technologists.


---

- 📖 My new book Effective Shell (Online Version) on Amazon (Print/Kindle)
- 🌍 Try hackerlaws.dev
- 🧠 Check out my new project Terminal AI
- 🎧 Listen to the podcast The Changelog - Laws for Hackers to Live By
- 🌏 See the Translations: 🇧🇷 🇨🇳 🇫🇷 🇮🇹 🇱🇻 🇰🇷 🇷🇺 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 🇮🇩 🇯🇵 🇵🇱 🇻🇳

---



- Introduction
- Laws
    - 90–9–1 Principle (1% Rule)
    - 90–90 Rule
    - Amdahl's Law
    - The Broken Windows Theory
    - Brooks' Law
    - CAP Theorem (Brewer's Theorem)
    - Clarke's three laws
    - Conway's Law
    - Cunningham's Law
    - Dunbar's Number
    - The Dunning-Kruger Effect
    - Fitts' Law
    - Gall's Law
    - Goodhart's Law
    - Hanlon's Razor
    - Hick's Law (Hick-Hyman Law)
    - Hofstadter's Law
    - Hutber's Law
    - The Hype Cycle & Amara's Law
    - Hyrum's Law (The Law of Implicit Interfaces)
    - Jevons' Paradox
    - Input-Process-Output (IPO)
    - Kernighan's Law
    - Koomey's Law
    - Linus's Law
    - Metcalfe's Law
    - Moore's Law
    - Murphy's Law / Sod's Law
    - Occam's Razor
    - Parkinson's Law
    - Premature Optimization Effect
    - Putt's Law
    - Reed's Law
    - The Bitter Lesson
    - The Ringelmann Effect
    - The Law of Conservation of Complexity (Tesler's Law)
    - The Law of Demeter
    - The Law of Leaky Abstractions
    - The Law of the Instrument
    - The Law of Triviality
    - The Unix Philosophy
    - The Scout Rule
    - The Spotify Model
    - The Two Pizza Rule
    - Twyman's law
    - Wadler's Law
    - Wheaton's Law
- Principles
    - All Models Are Wrong (George Box's Law)
    - Chesterton's Fence
    - Kerckhoffs's principle
    - The Dead Sea Effect
    - The Dilbert Principle
    - The Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule)
    - The Shirky Principle
    - The Stochastic Parrot
    - The Peter Principle
    - The Robustness Principle (Postel's Law)
    - SOLID
    - The Single Responsibility Principle
    - The Open/Closed Principle
    - The Liskov Substitution Principle
    - The Interface Segregation Principle
    - The Dependency Inversion Principle
    - The DRY Principle
    - The KISS principle
    - YAGNI
    - The Fallacies of Distributed Computing
    - The Principle of Least Astonishment
- Reading List
- Online Resources
- Podcast
- Contributors



 Introduction

There are lots of laws which people discuss when talking about development. This repository is a reference and overview of some of the most common ones. Please share and submit PRs!

This project may in time be turned into a book. Contributions will be acknowledged where reasonably practical. See the Contributing Guidelines for details.

Warning: This repo contains an explanation of some laws, principles and patterns, but does not _advocate_ for any of them. Whether they should be applied will always be a matter of debate, and greatly dependent on what you are working on.

 Laws

Laws can be opinions on inevitabilities in th