Software Engineering Philosophy

This section outlines the core principles guiding how we design, implement, and maintain software. These principles exist to reduce ambiguity, prevent architectural drift, and ensure long-term maintainability.

Core Values

Explicit is always better than implicit

Code should leave no room for assumptions. Always favor clarity over cleverness.
Implicit behavior must be documented and justified when unavoidable.

Descriptive naming is better than short-hand

Names should describe what something does or represents, even if it means typing more.
Abbreviations are acceptable only when they are universally understood, unambiguous and or defined in documentation.

Consistency is king

Inconsistent code is harder to maintain than slow code. Matching the existing code style is crucial.
Local consistency within a module is preferable to global inconsistency across the codebase.

Fail fast and prefer early returns over deeply nested conditionals

Guard against invalid states and exit as soon as a failure is detected.
This keeps control flow flat, readable, and easier to reason about.

Test edge-cases early

If a function can fail, make it fail during development, not in production.
Use assertions, debug-only checks and logging generously where appropriate.

Prioritize runtime performance

Every design choice should consider its impact on real-time execution.
Performance is not an afterthought — it's a primary goal, especially in hot code-paths.

Optimize, optimize, optimize

Focus optimization efforts on performance-critical and hot code-paths.
Non-critical code should prioritize readability and correctness over micro-optimizations.

Minimal state, maximal clarity

Avoid unnecessary shared or mutable state.
Favor local variables and or shared immutability where possible - const-correctness is key.

Be predictable and deterministic

Code should behave as expected without surprises.
Avoid magic literals, hidden side-effects, global state dependencies, and undocumented behavior.

Zero-cost abstractions

Abstractions must not introduce runtime overhead.
If an abstraction costs extra, it must be justified by a measurable and documented benefit.

Avoid clever one-liners

Readability trumps cleverness.
If a trick saves a few keystrokes but hides intent, do not use it.

Never nest

Nesting types is the root of all evil, unless kept private, tightly scoped, or for a thin configuration struct.

Never ever use snake case

we_really_really_hate_snake_case!

Quality through iteration

Improvements are driven by feedback, peer review, and refactoring.
Code quality is treated as a continuous process, not a one-time milestone.

Design and Architecture Principles

Simplicity beats generality

Solve the current problem well before designing for hypothetical future use-cases.
Over-generalization increases complexity and maintenance cost.

Prefer composition over inheritance

Composition provides clearer ownership, better testability, and fewer implicit behaviors than deep inheritance hierarchies.

Ownership must be obvious

Resource ownership and lifetime must be clear from the API alone.
If ownership is non-obvious, the design is wrong or under-documented.

APIs are contracts

Public interfaces must be stable, well-documented, and difficult to misuse.
Breaking changes require explicit justification and coordination.

Decision Considerations

When making engineering or architectural decisions, consider:

The impact on readability and long-term maintenance.
Alignment with existing architecture, conventions and standards.
Technical trade-offs and future implications considering the project's roadmap.
Risk, complexity, scalability, and testing cost
Failure modes and debuggability.

Software Expectations

Code must be testable and demonstrably correct.
Peer-review is strongly encouraged.
Documentation accompanies new systems and or architectural decisions.
Breaking code may not be committed to default branches (master/main).

Continuous Improvement

Intricate Dev Team's standards are updated as our needs evolve alongside our projects and their requirements.
Suggestions for changes are welcome and should be proposed appropriately and discussed collaboratively.