The 20 Software Engineering Laws

A curated overview of 20 foundational software engineering laws that explain why projects fail, systems grow complex, and teams slow down. Covers laws grouped into six themes: how systems get built (Gall's Law, KISS, Conway's Law, Hyrum's Law, CAP Theorem, Zawinski's Law), how teams lose speed (Brooks's Law, Ringelmann Effect, Price's Law), why plans drift (Hofstadter's Law, Dunning-Kruger Effect, Parkinson's Law), how metrics distort work (Goodhart's Law, Gilb's Law), what breaks under load (Knuth's Optimization Principle, Amdahl's Law, Murphy's Law, Postel's Law), and how to judge better (Sturgeon's Law, Cunningham's Law). Each law is explained with real-world examples from software history and the author's personal career. The post also promotes the author's book covering 56 such laws.