Let's go!
- All models are wrong, but some are useful.
- (That's it. That's the Tweet.)
- Chesterton's fence
- Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
- Conway's law
- Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
- Cunningham’s law
- The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.
- Fred Clark's law
- Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
- Goodhart's law
- Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
- Hawthorne effect
- Humans change their behaviour as soon as they know they are being watched.
- Hyrum's law
- With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
- Jevons paradox
- When technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use (thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application); however, as the cost of using the resource drops, if demand is highly price elastic, this results in overall demand increasing, causing total resource consumption to rise.
- Kidlin’s Law
- If you can write the problem down clearly, the matter is half solved.
- Murphy's law
- Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. (Or more broadly: Anything that can happen will happen.)
- Not Invented Here Syndrome
- the tendency to avoid using or buying products, research, standards, or knowledge from external origins.
- Pareto’s Law
- 80 % of outcomes come from 20 % of causes.
- Parkinson's law
- Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
- Perfect is the enemy of good
- Insistence on perfection often prevents implementation of good improvements.
- Putt’s Law(?)
- Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
- The attractive nuisance doctrine
- A landowner may be held liable for injuries to children trespassing on the land if the injury is caused by an object on the land that is likely to attract children.
- The Dunning–Kruger effect
- A cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.
- The XY problem
- The question is about an end user's attempted solution (X) rather than the root problem itself (Y or Why?).
- Zawinski's Law
- Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Contribute
This list is by no means complete. If you you have a relevant entry to contribute, fire us a pull request! (The entries live in src/components/entries.astro.)