Some Guiding Principles on Coding

• Code affects humans, not machines.
• Think through the consequences of design decisions.
• Tradeoffs are everywhere, document them.
• Taking on technical debt should be an informed decision, not the default.
• All resources are finite.
• Share, teach, and be taught.
• Don’t hesitate to create and improve your tools.
• Know your complexity bounds and impossibility results.
• Algebraic laws are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those.
• When in doubt, create beauty.

These principles were the first (and for a long while only) writing on my website. When I put them up in 2019, I fully expected to feel ashamed for them after a few years’ time. As of now (2025), I think they still hold up well.

However, coding itself has become less important for me. I do not feel sufficiently excited about it anymore to devote landing page space to these principles. So away they go, into a remote, rarely-read post. Nevertheless, you just found them. Yay!

If I wrote these today, I would probably add two more principles — both corollaries of “all resources are finite”, and both imparted to me by wise fellow humans:

• Don’t be lazy.
• But also, be kind to yourself.