Top all-time · #3946
Steve Smith
Personal blog · ardalis.comprogrammingcareer
Steve Smith's personal blog at ardalis.com covers programming and career. Since 2015, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 26 times, most often “Postel's Law – The Robustness Principle”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters mostly link these posts as references on Conway's law and microservices, Postel's law, and NuGet packages. One commenter recommends the site's tips newsletter.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Software Architecture, Clean Code, and .NET Development
Most-linked posts?
- Postel's Law – The Robustness Principle3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-09-06
What Hacker News says?
Cargo[1]. REPL[2]. [1]: https://ardalis.com/how-to-add-a-nuget-package-using-dotnet-... [2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/tutorials/fsh...
Comment linking /how-to-add-a-nuget-package-using-dotnet-add
on “Why you should learn F#”Submitted Avoid Lazy Loading Entities in Asp.net Applications as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think this was the meme before moduliths[1][2] where people conflated the operational and code change aspects of microservices. But it's just additional incidental complexity that you should resist. IOW you can do as many deploys without microservices if you organize your monolithic app as independent modules, while keeping out the main disadvantages of the microservice (infra/cicd/etc complexity, and turning your…
Comment linking /introducing-modular-monoliths-goldilocks-architecture/
on “Slow deployment causes meetings (2015)”Submitted Trunk-Based Development vs. Long-Lived Feature Branches: Which One Is Right? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat's exactly what i'm doing for my ( almost fulltime) side-project. While we do Microservices at work ( distrubited team and Conway's law does make sense: https://ardalis.com/conways-law-ddd-and-microservices/ ) It doesn't make sense for me personally. So I applied all DDD logic and implemented it in my app. In dotnet there is a useful feature where functionality from referenced projects is included in your main W…
Comment linking /conways-law-ddd-and-microservices/
on “Starting with microservices”Submitted Configure Visual Studio to Name Private Fields with Underscore as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's called "Conway's law" https://ardalis.com/conways-law-ddd-and-microservices/#:~:te... .
Comment linking /conways-law-ddd-and-microservices/
on “You Want Modules, Not Microservices”Submitted MVC Controllers Are Dinosaurs – Embrace API Endpoints as a story · 2 points
HN discussionwhich has had some backlash of late? it seems that one should not be liberal in any capacity because it results in undetected corner-cases https://ardalis.com/postels-law-robustness-principle/ https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-03....
Comment linking /postels-law-robustness-principle/
on “Vague Standards Are Trouble”Submitted Postel's Law – The Robustness Principle as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI can recommend: https://blog.bytebytego.com/ https://bigtechdigest.substack.com/ https://www.oreilly.com/emails/newsletters/ https://ardalis.com/tips
Comment linking /tips
on “Ask HN: What tech newsletters are you currently subscribing?”Submitted Becoming a Developer Team Force Multiplier as a story · 2 points
HN discussionsounds like Postel's law in play, but I agree it's annoying that there are incorrect / bad atom emitters. https://ardalis.com/postels-law-robustness-principle/
Comment linking /postels-law-robustness-principle/
on “The Atom Feed Format Was Born 20 Years Ago”Submitted Share what you learn as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted AI Benefits – But at What Cost? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted LLMs will need 'Mark as Answer' to Learn as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building a Resilient Email Sending Method in .NET with SmtpClient as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What If Product Owners Reported to Dev Teams? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What is the difference between a DTO and a POCO (or POJO) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Attacking Technical Debt as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Listing Strongly Typed Enum Options in C# as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Logging (and Monitoring) are (real) Requirements as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Group Your Constants and Enums as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Avoid Referencing Infrastructure in Visual Studio Solutions as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Enum Alternatives in C# as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Web Security Resources as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
