A list of laws, principles, and mental models that I find myself referencing from time to time
| Name | Origin | Formulation |
|---|---|---|
| Murphy’s Law | Edward A. Murphy Jr., 1949 | ”If there’s more than one way to do a job, and one of them will result in disaster, somebody will do it that way” or “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” |
| Hanlon’s Razor | Robert J. Hanlon, 1980 | Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. |
| Dunning–Kruger Effect | Dunning & Kruger, 1999 | Beginners overestimate, experts underestimate (Unskilled and Unaware of It) |
| Brooks’s Law | Fred Brooks, 1975 | Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later (Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid book) |
| Conway’s Law | Melvin Conway, 1967 | ”Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure (Committees paper)” or common version like “Systems mirror the org structure that built them” but also Inverse Conway Maneuver which is “Structure teams to get the architecture you want” |
| Knuth’s Principle | Donald Knuth, 1974 | Premature optimization is the root of all evil (Structured programming with ‘go to’ statements) |
| … | … | … |