Always consider your design a subsystem.
Jabe Bloom
When we build software, we aren’t building it in nowhere. We aren’t building a closed system that doesn’t interact with its environment. We aren’t building it for our own computer (unless we are; personal automation is fun). We are building it for a purpose. Chances are, we build it for a unique purpose — because why else would they pay us to do it?
Understanding that surrounding system, the “why” of our product and each feature, makes a big difference in making good design decisions within the system.
It’s like, the system we’re building is our own house. We build on a floor of infrastructure other people have created (language, runtime, dependency manager, platform), making use of materials that we find in the world (libraries, services, tools). We want to understand how those work, and how our own software works. This is all inside our house.
To do that well, keep the windows open. Look outside, ask questions of the world. What purpose is our system serving? What effects does it have, and what effects from other subsystems does it strengthen?
Whenever you’re designing something, the first step is: What is the system my system lives in? I need to understand that system to understand what my system does.
Jabe Bloom
It is a big world out there, and these are questions we can never answer completely. It’s tempting to stay indoors where it’s warm. We can’t know everything, but we gotta try for more.