#software-engineering (41)
Heavy lurker and superuser skew is normal in participatory systems, which matters when you read feedback or run an internal forum.
Eric Brewer's CAP conjecture became a precise impossibility result for linearizable read-write services under arbitrary message loss.
20% of the product takes 80% of the time. And 80% of the impact is driven by 20% of the product.
Why software work slips after you add slack, and how the joke about recursion maps onto real plans.
What Robin Dunbar's ~150 limit claims, and how it shows up in org design, on-call, and communication load.
Why the last slice of a build eats most of the calendar, and what to do about it.
Treat Murphy's law as risk hygiene, not fate. Defensive design, testing, and SRE habits turn the slogan into something you can ship.
Why 'be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept' still shapes APIs and parsers, and where it breaks.
Why velocity, coverage targets, and badly written OKRs invite gaming once they become the scoreboard.
Hunt and Thomas on why duplicated knowledge is a maintenance tax, and when merging similar code makes change harder.