Thoughts on A Philosophy of Software Design

Jeff Morhous
4 min readOct 28, 2022

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I recently finished reading “A Philosophy of Software Design” by John Ousterhout. It’s a brief but dense book full of the author’s opinions on designing software well.

Right from the beginning, John calls out that complexity is the enemy of well-designed software. Most of the book is spent discussing either why complexity is bad or ways to avoid it when writing code.

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Jeff Morhous

Jeff is a Software Engineer building web apps with Ruby on Rails