Home About 2014-12-23 by Quinlan Pfiffer <span class="comment_count"><a href="/blog/0005_Maintainable_Software.html#disqus_thread">Comments</a></span> I recently read The Lava Layer Anti-Pattern and it inspired me to try to write down some of the rules discovered over my short software career. Most of the time I joke about having no dependencies on a project, but a lot of the time it makes sense. There are a few things that I've been seeing repeated over the past year or so that I think are good ideas, so I'm going to attempt to write them down. "You overloaded plus? What does plus do?" This one comes straight from the functional programming world, but can easily be applied to imperative languages as well. Side-effects are the bane of anyone trying to reason about your program, and reasoning about a large program you're trying to maintain is important. If you don't know wh...