Developing Software With First Principles Thinking

To grant me a vision of Silicon's forces
That bind the world, all its seeds and sources
And innermost Go code—all this I shall see,
And stop peddling in packages that mean nothing to me.

(Very freely adapted from Goethe's Faust.)

When I glanced over the featured articles of my latest newsletter issue, I felt they had an underlying topic in common. It took me a while and a few decomposing steps to discover what it is: First Principles thinking, a method of reasoning that starts with decomposing things down to the fundamental axioms.

That's what the featured articles above basically do: They pick an HTTP router apart, split time format strings into their atomic elements, or look into the mechanisms of fuzz testing.

Go is actually great at helping you with First Principles thinking! The language itself is relatively small and straightforward, with few hidden mechanisms. Rather than hiding complexity behind layers of abstraction, Go exposes the fundamental mechanics of what's happening. Even Go's standard library follows this pattern: it provides the building blocks rather than high-level abstractions, encouraging developers to understand and compose these blocks according to their needs. What a great opportunity to wrap your brains around the building blocks of development and achieve mechanical sympathy.

Why does this matter? Because when you understand the fundamentals:

• Your code becomes slim and clean and maintainable—you won't blindly include unnecessary dependencies that bloat your code but rather write simpler solutions supported by fundamental principles
• Debugging becomes more intuitive—you know where to look when things go wrong because you have internalized the way Go code works.
• Architecture decisions become more informed—you can better evaluate trade-offs (as with decisions like, for example, “monolith vs microservice” or “SQL vs NoSQL”)

Mastering Go—and software development in general—isn't about learning more abstractions. It's about understanding the fundamentals deeply and applying them wisely.