Clean Architecture

What Hacker News says

1. random_cat_8745Sep 2026
   Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin. I'm enjoying it so far, there is overlap with Clean Code, it is a great reminder that there is no silver bullet for software architecture.

   I'm also reading Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne by David Gaider, the original writer of Dragon Age.

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2. KerrickDec 2025
   Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You. This book convinced me to stop widening my skillset by beginning again, and start doubling down on my strengths.

   Gene Kim et al., The Phoenix Project. This book reinvigorated my love for management, which I lost in 2021–2022. I'm still an IC, but I decided to stop refusing management roles.

   Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd Edition. This book lit a fire under my ass to figure out better ways of working. I followed it up with the next one in a book club at work.

   James Shore et al., The Art of Agile Software Development, 2nd Edition. This book gave me hope that a productive, humanist, productivity-oriented workflow can work in today's software world. I read it with my teammates in a book club at work, including the software engineers, QA tester, product owners, and UX designer. Unfortunately the rest of my team had little interest in putting it into place where I work.

   Robert C. Martin,

   Clean Architecture. This book was a delightful read. Uncle Bob weaved practical advice together with stories from his past that served both to illustrate his points and to entertain. While I don't agree with every word in the book (e.g. Screaming Architecture), I still recommend it to every Senior+ Software Engineer.

   Eric Evans,

   Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. Aside from its amazing content, this book has some of the best typesetting I've ever seen. I sought out a font that is a match (or near-match) and reverse-engineered the letter spacing, line height, heading font sizes, etc. Its content was great too, but I was glad to have read Vaughn Vernon's DDDD first.

   Vaughn Vernon,

   Domain-Driven Design Distilled. This book followed up Shore's work in our book club at work. Everybody on the team really liked what they read, but nobody felt like they had actionable insights. So the engineers went on to read Vernon's IDDD, and the non-engineers read Adzic's IM and Patton's USM.

   Vaughn Vernon,

   Implementing Domain-Driven Design. I read this book with a book club at work. While Evans's work was well-grounded in theory and left a lot of interpretation in the patterns behind DDD, Vernon is a practical, nuts-and-bolts DIY guide to one approach to DDD. Luckily, these tactics resonated with my team and our codebase has seen marked improvements in the past few months. I'm looking forward to our process catching up so we can do more than "DDD Lite."

   Jeff Patton,

   User Story Mapping. This book was fun, practical, and completely outside any way I'd ever worked. It also helped me understand exactly why I've failed every time I tried to make my own SaaS startup on nights and weekends.

   Gojko Adzic,

   Impact Mapping. This book was basically a pamphlet. The process seems...good? But since I'm no longer in a role with the influence or authority to recommend product direction, I doubt I'll get much use out of this for a while.

   Tanya Reilly,

   The Staff Engineer's Path. This book wants to follow in the footsteps of Camille Fournier's The Manager's Path, but it seemed less specific and useful as a roadmap. Perhaps that's because of how different "Staff Engineer" is from company to company, at least when compared to the roles covered by Fournier. But it did help me earn my promotion to* Staff Engineer, so it was clearly worth reading.

   Tamar Rosier, Your Brain's Not Broken. This book was the second I read after I got diagnosed with adult ADHD. I appreciated that it helped me de-stigmatize, because I harbored some bummer feelings when I realized no actually I didn't grow out of it. It also helped me reflect on my habits of action, and see them in a new light. I was surprised to see how much of my anger and frustration in life was a coping mechanism to help me get things done. I've had a much calmer life since recognizing that.

   Alexander Tarlinder, Developer Testing. I'm not quite finished with this book, but I'll be done by the end of the year. It's been a great overview of automated testing from the perspective of a programmer. It helped refresh my memory on things I knew but forgot. It filled gaps that I had in my baseline knowledge. It corrected things I "knew" but was slightly incorrect about. I now recommend this to any programmer, whether or not they've got a habit of testing.

   Austin Kleon's trilogy: Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work, Keep Going. These books were cute, full of incredibly quotable passages, and fun to read. I didn't spend enough time on them, though. A lot of the lessons I thought I'd learned left my brain like water through a sieve.

   Kent Beck, Tidy First?. This book helped me understand the economics of software through a new light. That was important to me, because during the time I spent as a Director of Software Engineering I was not given a budget and asked to manage the department's expenses.

   Antonio Cangiano, Technical Blogging, 2nd Edition. This book convinced me to start a blog. It was going really well, and then I shrank back from it due to fear of vulnerability. Since I got over those fears and started blogging again, it's been a lot of fun again. I incorporated what would've been tweets into the blog (as "quick posts") in addition to my longer-form, less-ephemeral content (as "articles"). Writing has been a great way to solidify what I've learned and distill my opinions. Heck, I should migrate this comment to my blog.

   I also read other books (especially on my journey to becoming a magician), but these were the ones I thought Hacker News might be most interested in.

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3. jjiceNov 2025
   It's a very solid broad programming book! I thought it was going to be too generic or over hyped, but it was solid. That said, I do find the most interesting software books to be about specifics, but that's nothing against this book.

   Out of the classic broad books that get recommended all the time, this is one of the best IMO. I really don't like Clean Code (Martin's follow up, Clean Architecture is fantastic, though). Refactoring by Fowler is also a great generalist language and system book (but a specific topic).

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4. jjiceSep 2025
   Some of my favorites that have stayed at least pretty relevant. Disclosure: not an old timer.

   - UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook. Get the most recently volume. It's a tomb (~1200 for the most recent).

   - If you do any SQL, SQY Performance Explained is an 80/20 read for DB indexes, query optimization, and troubleshooting

   - A Philosophy of Software Design (more recent). Just a great book on good design considerations to keep in mind.

   - Mastering Regular Expressions. The first half of the book will make you confident. The second half will show you how they're implemented. Regular expressions aren't something to be afraid of!

   - Designing Data Intensive Applications (more recent). Great book about data infra design decisions. Maybe not the scope you're looking for though.

   - Design Patterns (Gang of Four). Absolute classic. Hard to read all the way through though, more of a reference read. You'll recognize a lot of the patterns. You'll find some great to see a formal definition of, and you'll see some you never want to use.

   - Clean Architecture - Uncle Bob's best book IMO. I really don't like Clean Code, but this book talks a lot about interfaces and the right level of separation in your systems.

   - K&R, as you mentioned, is of course a classic

   - The AWK Programming Language is a nice quick read with similar quality and structure to K&R.

   - Beej's Guide to Network Programming. The best overview of network programming, including the C API. Plus this book is genuinely funny. Beej has a ton of great stuff, all on their website for free, or in print.

   - The Rust Programming Language is very well written too. Also online for free or in print.

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5. dgunayFeb 2025
   I find it funny how much people obsess over Clean Code. In my opinion Robert Martin's Clean Architecture is a much more valuable and realistic idea than all this madness about 3 line functions, no comments, do one thing, etc. I would take the ugliest code that followed Clean Architecture over any "Clean Code" that didn't bother sensibly separating business logic and I/O.

   I don't like the guy very much, but for web development even just mostly following Clean Architecture does so much to keep things from devolving into chaos long term.

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6. mrkeenFeb 2025
   I read Clean Code and don't remember a single thing from it. To be fair it was a while ago.

   But the SOLID and Clean Architecture principles inform me almost daily.

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