Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
Cunningham's Law
The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.
Doerr's Law
We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.
Fitt's Law
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and the size of the target.
Gall's Law
A complex system that works has evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system built from scratch won't work.
Goodhart's Law
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Greenspun's tenth rule
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
Hofstadter's Law
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Hyrum's Law
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
Kerchkhoff's principle
In cryptography, a system should be secure even if everything about the system, except for a small piece of information - the key - is public knowledge.
Kernighan's Law
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
Knuth's optimization principle
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Law of Leaky Abstractions
All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.
Linus's Law
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
Lady Lovelace's Objection
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.
Moore's Law
The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.
Norvig's Law
Any technology that surpasses 50% penetration will never double again.
Parkinson's Law
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Peter Principle
People in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence."
Postel's Law
Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept.
Shirky principle
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Wirth's Law
Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
Zawinski's Law
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.