Beyond Legacy Code

To Be a Principle

Principles can be crisp and clearly defined, or they can be vague and unarticulated. Whether stated elegantly or not, principles point us in the right direction and take us closer to the true nature of what the principle applies to. Principles may give us insight or just be good advice. And by “us” I mean not just software developers but everyone those developers might come in contact with—everyone on and around a software development team.

Principles help us generalize about a thing. They help us organize our knowledge. Not all principles are equal. Some are purer, more basic than others, and as we saw, principles from which you can infer other principles are called first principles.

I think of principles as lofty goals. They’re ...