SOLID and Clean Code never felt solid or clean to me..2026-07-01
SOLID and Clean Code never felt solid or clean to me<br>Published 2026-07-01T00:00:00Z<br>Daniel<br>I learned to program through online documentation and projects. I also read books but I don’t consider them pivotal to my programming or software engineering career. Some of the books I read are:<br>Designing Data-Intensive Applications: really good book.
The Mythical Man-Month: felt outdated but useful to understand where the industry came from
Design Patterns, Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software: I don’t remember much. I think I read this too early to fully grasp all patterns but at least it gave me a general understanding of Design Patterns
Clean Code: this book felt like a bunch of advice from a senior engineer, but much of it not being verifiably good advice. As an outsider it at least made me aware that I had to be conscious that my code was going to be read.
One day an interviewer asked me about design patterns and SOLID principles. I started talking about the ones I learned from the Gang of Four book, but he stopped me and said that he meant SOLID principles, and that he was not sure what I was talking about. Now in retrospect I know he was just reading the rubric without knowing much about the topic but I left that interview confused.<br>So I googled SOLID principles and landed on a video where this “uncle bob” dude spent a good chunk of his introduction talking about the water molecule only to then take more than 10 minutes to explain that the rate of new programmers was constantly doubling and that as long as this rate of growth continued, half of all engineers would always be inexperienced. Then after a whole 20 minutes into the talk he starts a real introduction when he explains that bad code slows you down (no shit, Sherlock), that code rigidity, coupling is bad, only to really get into the topic 30 minutes in.<br>Nearly half of the talk could have been fully explained in 5 minutes.<br>Where I was coming from<br>Around that time I was in my 3rd year studying history. I had to read and write 1000s of pages a week. I learned that not everyone writes the same and that different disciplines have different writing styles. If you were writing history there’s a structure and vocabulary you were implicitly supposed to follow, same for other social sciences, and I assume it’s the same for the hard sciences as well.<br>I see them as cultural rules that arise from reading each other’s work until some writing culture emerges. So in order to get good grades I’d try to mimic my professors and their preferred authors writing and investigation styles for my essays. I started to get a feeling of what kind of author I was reading, how dense their writing was, the pacing, and how they mixed narrative with argumentation.<br>Also for reasons I won’t explain here by around that time I had seen around maybe 4 or 5 successful scams/cons very closely. Like actually helplessly being around the con-man and the victim as the con was happening, for months.<br>All this to say that I had developed a sense for understanding how people wrote and spoke.<br>Why does this read like a con?<br>Not to disrespect “uncle bob” but everything he wrote and talked made me feel like I was being scammed out of my time while trying to convince me this was the talk/writing of a genius programmer.<br>First of all there’s the “uncle bob” nickname, which has this backstory:<br>Just to be clear, the name “Uncle Bob” was given to me by a coworker in 1989. It was in my email and uunet signature for years. (There are kids out there who don’t know what uunet was). The name stuck, and I eventually adopted it as a brand.<br>– Robert C. Martin, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7713646
It’s an ok explanation but that doesn’t change the fact that the name still feels manipulative for someone that was trying to establish a brand of being a dependable senior engineer.<br>Also as a side-note, OF COURSE THERE ARE KIDS THAT DON’T KNOW WHAT UUNET WAS.<br>We get it. You are an “experienced” programmer.
Engineers have a tendency to assume they are impartial machines that are able to see the objective truth, but if there’s something that I learned while studying history is that the only way to be able to strive to be objective is to embrace the fact that you are a subjective human being. The more objective you assume you are, the more easily manipulated you can be by subjectivity, be it your own subjectivity or others. The fact that I had coworkers speak fondly of “Uncle Bob” as if he was a real wise uncle and cite him to justify some convoluted dependency injection shenanigans made all my manipulation-senses go off.<br>Then we have the actual prose he uses. As I said before, his style is overly dependent on filler content. Of course it’s not just random filler content. It’s...