The Timeless Way of Building
The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander is a 1979 book that proposes a theory of design and architecture. It had a huge influence on the then-emerging practice of software design. I picked up the book early in my time at Stripe, and it influenced my own approach to API design, and creation in general.
Naming is fundamental
The search for a name is a fundamental part of the process of inventing or discovering a pattern. So long as a pattern has a weak name, it means that it is not a clear concept.
Simple rules, patiently applied
You might define the task of design as a huge task, in which something gigantic is brought to birth, suddenly, in a single act, whose inner workings cannot be explained, whose substance relies ultimately on the ego of the creator.
Imagine, by contrast, a system of simple rules, patiently applied, until they gradually form a thing. Here there is no mastery of unnameable creative processes: only the patience of a craftsman, chipping away slowly; the mastery of what is made does not lie in the depths of some impenetrable ego; it lies, instead, in the simple mastery of the steps in the process, and in the definition of these steps.
Just as a great artist is one who observes very carefully the things which make the difference, so it does take great powers of observation—great depth, great concentration—to formulate these simple rules.
Great patterns feel alive
You can focus on each pattern by itself, one at a time, certain that those patterns which come later in the sequence will fit into the design which has evolved so far. You can pay full attention to each pattern; you can let it have its full intensity. Then you can give each pattern just that strange intensity which makes the pattern live.
Once you find the proper sequence, the power to design coherent things follows from it almost automatically, and you will be able to make a beautiful and whole design, without any trouble. If the sequence is correctly formed, you can create a beautiful whole, almost without trying, because it is in the nature of your mind to do so.
Alive patterns contain forces
A pattern only works, fully, when it deals with all the forces that are actually present in a situation. The difficulty is that we have no reliable way of knowing just exactly what the forces in a situation are.
The “bad” patterns are unable to contain the forces which occur in them.
The only way a pattern can help make a situation genuinely more alive is by recognizing all the forces which actually exist, and then finding a world in which these forces can slide past each other.
In a system which approaches the character of nature, the parts must be adapted with an almost infinite degree of subtlety: and this requires that the process of adaptation be going on through the system, constantly.