Ask HN: Best codebases to study to learn software design?

Thanks! I appreciate it!

you mention a key point. profession. programmer doesnt really imply professional programmer.

I'd aay if you do it for a living, certain tedious chores must be learned. the best programmers i know (professional) can all read code. they spent many junior years learning to read it, being on code auditing desk.... nowadays idk how the landscape looks, but for all of them they had to review and read code to find bugs before they were allowed to produce code (they all worked at same company ofc... so my view is limited!)

i do feel such discipline is needed. they can always poke holes on my code no matter how many holes i plug :) - i am semi professional. i write code for work, but not production code. (experimental). i never learned to audit code and feel that makes it impossible for me to truly create production grade code

> for me it seems like you have to actually run into problems over and over and figure out how to avoid the problems

This shows how immature the field of software engineering is. Imagine bridges or houses were built like that. Or your surgeon was trained like that.

Over time, we hopefully develop estblished norms, but at the moment, things are too much in flux. Put 5 sw engineers in a room, pose a problem and you will get not just 5 different solution proposals, but there will likely be strong disagreements on which approach is a good one.

"I recognize a good solution when I see it" is just not good enough for a serious engineering discipline.

I've done this for years and swear by it.

Top 5 codebases for changing my mind about things:

Wietse Venema's Postfix mail server. Taught me tons about security posture, the architecture i'd describe as microservices before microservices was a thing, but contrary to the modern take on microservices (it's mostly a tool for decomposing work across large semi-isolated groups) this was primarily about security and simplicity.

Spring framework - this opened my eyes to ways of working that i hadn't really thought enough about before, the developers on that project have a culture of deeply considering the needs of their users (who are java developers often in an enterprise environment).

Git - the thing i like about the git code base is that once you've covered the objects database (e.g. blobs, trees and commits) and the implementation of refs, everything else just feels like additional incremental features. With those core concepts, everything else is kinda harmoniously built on top.

Varnish by Poul Henning-Kamp is another one - feels like he went to great lengths to make that code base a teaching tool despite the fact it's also a top tier reverse proxy.

Last one isn't a code base - but it will help with software design in the large; studying how the lieutenants model works in the linux kernel.

Thinking about my answers, i think i've highlighted something subtly different than "well designed codebases" it's more a list of codebases that left a notable long lasting impression on me because of design decisions they made.

> This shows how immature the field of software engineering is. Imagine bridges or houses were built like that. Or your surgeon was trained like that.

It's not that software engineering is immature, it's just more dynamic.

We are not the surgeon, we write the surgeon. We write a surgeon to fix a broken leg. Once that is done, we don't have to fix another leg. Now we need to reattach a finger. Once that is solved, maybe replace a kidney.

You cannot repetitively train or have strict rules for that, because every time it's something new. You need to have broad knowledge and experience to be able to fight the next unknown challenge. It's unknown because it's never been done before, or it has been done but your competitor will not reveal the details.

Building bridges or being a surgeon sounds very boring to me, since it's always the same (maybe some minor variants). Building software? Very much not the same.