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Understanding Hyrum's Law in Software Engineering

By

andsoitis

10mo ago· 4 min readenInsight

Summary

The article discusses 'Hyrum's Law,' an observation in software engineering stating that with enough users of an API, all observable behaviors of the system will be depended on by someone, regardless of the promised contract. The author reflects on their experience with low-level infrastructure migrations in a complex software system, highlighting the distinction between interfaces and their implementations.

Key quotes

· 2 pulled
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
We typically think of the interface as an abstraction for interacting with a system (like the steering wheel and pedals).
Snippet from the RSS feed
Put succinctly, the observation is this:

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