Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by krisoft 1184 days ago
> if I couldn't explain it to my partner, it was not a very good solution

Absolutely. I used to work in an aviation company writing software. When we were discusing architectural decisions (big or small) we often played around with the following thought experiment: Imagine that there was an accident with an airplane which was using our software. Maybe it was our fault, maybe not. Nobody knows. You are sitting in a cramped room with an irate NTSB investigator who points at this part of the code and asks “why on earth did you think this was a good idea?” If you don’t have a good and easy to understand answer to this question maybe we shouldn’t do it that way.