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Ask HN: Good open source repos with decision process?

by lapaz17 on 1/11/23, 7:27 PM with 3 comments

Some devs say, you learn programming by reading code but sometimes reading is not enough. I want to learn story behind it (why it is written like that). Any repos with good articles providing history?

  • by AlexITC on 1/12/23, 2:14 AM

    Shameless plug, while this does not have full articles explaining decision process, I started tracking design decision with a short summary and the date those choices were introduced: https://github.com/wiringbits/scala-webapp-template/blob/mas...

    This has been helpful to my team because there are times where something does not seem right, or, it just seems a weird choice, documenting the reasoning can help new team members to understand this.

    In retrospective, I should have started doing this many years ago.

  • by Jugurtha on 1/11/23, 8:24 PM

    If you're at the repo level, then read the commit messages, release notes, and issues and comments linked to a pull-requests. They will contain the rationale and discussions on technical decisions and the tradeoffs behind them.

  • by superdeeda on 1/11/23, 10:54 PM

    This sounds right up your alley: http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html