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

Proceed with extreme caution. This is highly subjective and often results in a blind leading the blind scenario. For example how do you determine which code bases are well designed if you yourself are not comfortable determining such?

Instead, heed the guidance of some of the other comments and just start building things. Plan on failing and solving for the failure. That’s called practice. With enough practice you will know what works well for you. If you are measuring things along the way you will also know what’s slow.

This is the engineering process. If you put five engineers of any discipline in a room, you will get five different answers. Every contractor and architect has their own ideas about how things should be done.

Furthermore, we do build houses this way, even in the modern age with building codes. The builder is going to do whatever they can get away with and this is a universal truth. The only reason bridges are held to such high standards is because of the monetary cost of a collapse.

The "norms" are not what you think they are. They're tradition, they're "we've always done it this way". What you're talking about are laws written for public safety. Those laws only exist because we tried and failed to do things a certain way and the cost in money or lives was untenable.

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

You're conflating engineering with science. A scientist will rigorously test and validate, but a huge part of engineering is just recognizing a good solution. Of course there's a lot of testing and validation in engineering as well, but not with the kind of rigor you're implying.

Study and fix shitty code.

Find college students who wrote a web server and put it on GitHub for the world to see.

Find all the bugs and then see how many integer overflow vulnerabilities can be exploited to crash it … or worse.

When design is a process to build something pleasing (like in music or painting), then yes, it's an art, and you can rightfully have different opinions about outcomes, sometimes diametrically opposed opinions, which is all not just fine and accepted but inherent in the field and a required ingredient.

When design is about building something functional, then it's part of engineering. You can objectively measure whether it does satisfy the requirements. That's where serious engineering disciplines are and where software engineering needs to aim for if it wants to keep engineering in its title without getting laughed at. As long as programmers consider themselves part artists, that's hard to achieve, but as the field matures, there is hope.

Note that some fields are trying to be both. For example architecture. There it's solved by making a more or less clear distinction between the pleasing art part (that's what the architect does) and the functional engineering part (structural engineer). Both roles are not being conflated. In software, we still do that.