In Pursuit of Elegance: 12 Indispensable Tips
The big takeaway:
Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and
surprisingly powerful. One without the other leaves you short of
elegant. And sometimes the “unusual simplicity” isn’t about what’s
there, it’s about what isn’t. At first glance, elegant things seem to
be missing something.(emphasis mine)
I also liked:
The point of elegance is to achieve the maximum impact with the minimum input. It’s a thoughtful, artful subtractive process focused on doing more and better with less.
A quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes:
It’s about finding the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
And...
What’s wrong with how we engineer things is that most of what we accept
as the proper order of things is based on assumptions, not observations. If we observed first, designed second, we wouldn’t need most of the things we build. [...] The one constant source of elegant innovation is observation.
