Ask HN: Best codebases to study to learn software design?

Maybe I’m just not good enough at paying attention, but for me it seems like you have to actually run into problems over and over and figure out how to avoid the problems. Then you end up being able to mentally simulate what problems you will run into, and design is basically all about avoiding future problems of various kinds (and balancing tradeoffs about which future problems to avoid and how much effort to put into each, whether you can solve multiple with one design play, etc).

That's kinda like saying you can learn to drive by just getting into a car, crashing then thinking about how not to crash it next time.

In reality both things are necessary. The car analogy doesn't hold for road driving because we drive well within the limits, but for racing it really is necessary to know exactly where the limits are. I don't think we should really be treating our profession like a race, though.

But if you don't read it's going to be an incredibly long slow process and a lot of car crashes and mangled gearboxes etc. So I say read, read, and read some more. Even if you don't see the point of it right now your experience will later find a place for it and you won't end up descending a hill for the first time not knowing to shift to a lower gear.

>That's kinda like saying you can learn to drive by just getting into a car, crashing then thinking about how not to crash it next time.

That would be a perfectly valid way of learning to drive if crashing had no danger or destruction and you could instantly reset the car every time. Software is a special case of engineering where the cost of failure is extremely low, so trial and error is generally the fastest way to get going with actually doing something.