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).

> for me it seems like you have to actually run into problems over and over and figure out how to avoid the problems

This shows how immature the field of software engineering is. Imagine bridges or houses were built like that. Or your surgeon was trained like that.

Over time, we hopefully develop estblished norms, but at the moment, things are too much in flux. Put 5 sw engineers in a room, pose a problem and you will get not just 5 different solution proposals, but there will likely be strong disagreements on which approach is a good one.

"I recognize a good solution when I see it" is just not good enough for a serious engineering discipline.

> This shows how immature the field of software engineering is. Imagine bridges or houses were built like that.

You're forgetting a key difference between software and the physical world.

The blessing and curse of software is that there are few constraints on the solution so it can take an enormous number of different forms and still be valid. There isn't gravity, friction or the various other things that constrain physical solutions.

And each of those almost limitless solutions has different trade-offs related to a large number of different variables. It takes many many years of seeing the different impacts of those design decisions across the different variables within the constraints of different domains and contexts.

It's truly a combinatorial problem with so many dimensions that no human is smart enough to just simulate the impact of design decisions in new and unfamiliar domains+context.

You could argue that there could be standard ways of doing things within specific domains+context, but the context is so varied between companies, and business priorities have so many differences that I don't think it's a solvable problem.

The best we can do is have higher level patterns and approaches to specific types of problems that can guide people based on others experiences, but all of that still needs to be mixed and matched for the specific problem space.