# dwmkerr/hacker-laws

🧠 Laws, Theories, Principles and Patterns for developers and technologists.

Repository: https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/hacker-laws
Homepage: http://hacker-laws.com/
Language: HTML
License: CC-BY-SA-4.0
License Family: other
Topics: principles, laws, coding, computerscience
Last push: 2026-05-19T06:22:17+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 87/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 83, release rhythm 84, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 3142, "days_push": 106, "days_rel": 106, "gap_med": 0, "n_releases_24m": 8}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 27267, forks 1563 (observed 2026-08-28T04:11:47.610183+00:00)

## What it is
A curated reference of laws, theories, principles, and patterns relevant to developers and technologists, such as Conway's Law, CAP Theorem, and SOLID. It is available as a website, markdown repository, and downloadable PDF eBook with many translations.

## Use cases
- look up what Conway's Law means
- find a list of software engineering principles like SOLID and DRY
- learn laws and theories every developer should know
- download a PDF reference of hacker laws
- explain CAP theorem and the fallacies of distributed computing
- find principles like YAGNI and KISS with explanations

## When to choose
- you want a quick, well-organized reference of computing laws and principles
- you need a shareable or translated summary of software engineering wisdom
- you are preparing learning material or onboarding docs for engineers

## When to avoid
- you need deep academic treatment of any single topic
- you want runnable code or tooling rather than reference text

## Facets
- artifact type: learning-resource
- maturity: active
- function: documentation
- domain: developer-tools, tutorials, education
- platform: cross-platform
- tags: awesome-list, reference, computer-science, software-engineering, principles, web-server

## Member repositories
- dwmkerr/hacker-laws (main) score 87

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:11:47.610183+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T16:54:33.759347+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws (fetched 2026-08-28T04:11:47.610183+00:00, sha 2616257c4d61)
  - homepage: http://hacker-laws.com/ (fetched 2026-08-29T07:51:40.161356+00:00, sha db2552086599)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.