Foreword

I started writing on www.codesimplicity.com in 2008 for one reason only – I wanted to make the world of software development a better place. I wasn't trying to be famous, or get contracting jobs, or push some ideology on people. My intention was purely to help people.

What I had observed was that there was a lot of opinion in the field of software engineering, but not a lot of facts or basic principles. Now, this might seem like a shocking statement to some people, because surely software development is a scientific field where we all know exactly what we're doing – we work with highly technical machines and we use a lot of complex systems to accomplish our jobs. There must be a science to it, right?

Well, the problem is that in order to be a science you must have laws and a system of organized information based on those laws. Usually, you also must demonstrate that your laws and your system actually work without exception in the physical universe. It&apos...