English

Load-Bearing: Which Software Principles Hold, and Where They Stop

"Dependencies must be acyclic" is nearly a mathematical fact. "Every repository gets an interface" is a local convention of one ecosystem. Both arrive in the same confident tone, so the convention gets applied everywhere as if it were the fact. Load-Bearing is a field guide for telling the two apart. Its question is the one a builder asks before knocking out a wall: is this load-bearing? Across 22 chapters it grades the advice developers live with: concurrency and clocks, distributed impossibility and queueing, layering, design patterns, TDD and mocks, abstraction, idioms and style, and the decisions a team never writes down. Each chapter states a claim, shows with a worked case why it holds, and shows where it stops. The code is mostly Go, with Python second. The ideas, arguments and examples are the author's. The prose was drafted with Claude and edited across 95 review passes, and every editorial decision is published with the book's source. Published under CC BY-NC 4.0, with its full source and history on GitHub.

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