Hacker Laws

Summary

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 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 the world of software engineering, or wry observations on unavoidable realities. 90–9–1 Principle (1% Rule) 1% Rule on Wikipedia The 90-9-1 principle suggests that within an internet community such as a wiki, 90% of participants only consume content, 9% edit or modify content and 1% of participants add content. Real-world examples: A 2014 study of four digital health social networks found the top 1% created 73% of posts, the next 9% accounted for an average of ~25% and the remaining 90% accounted for an average of 2% (Reference) See Also: 90–90 Rule 90-90 Rule on Wikipedia The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. A wry reinterpretation of the Pareto Principe (or 80-20 rule) that highlights the real-world challenges of completing engineering work. This sentiment is also echoed in Hofstadter's Law. See also: Amdahl's Law Amdahl's Law on Wikipedia Amdahl's Law is a formula which shows the potential speedup of a computational task which can be achieved by increasing the resources of a system. Normally used in parallel computing, it can predict the actual benefit of increasing the number of processors, which is limited by the parallelisability of the program. Best illustrated with an example. If a program is made up of two parts, part A, which must be executed by a single processor, and part B, which can be parallelised, then we see that adding multiple processo...