Complexity: Software Design Philosophy in the SwiftUI Era
Software does not collapse overnight. It erodes, like empires once did, under the silent weight of complexity.
Complexity: Software Design Philosophy in the SwiftUI Era is a book about that erosion. It is not a catalog of APIs, nor a checklist of techniques, but a set of stories and reflections on why code grows heavy, why teams lose clarity, and how we might hold the line.
From Airbnb's struggles with React Native to Dropbox's long refactor, from Microsoft Office's inheritance abyss to NASA's Apollo landings, the same truth repeats: software does not die from bugs, it dies from complexity. Netflix, Spotify, Slack, Uber, and even Nintendo remind us that the fight is not about technology alone, but about the limits of human cognition and the culture of teams.
This book revisits principles through the lens of SwiftUI: SOLID, Clean Code, deep modules, single sources of truth, state-driven architecture, TCA's reducer tree, and the discipline of boundaries. These are not abstract slogans, but shields against the flood of branching logic, framework "magic," and the illusions of cross-platform shortcuts.
You will walk through choices that shape the lifespan of software: the allure of Flutter and React Native versus the long-term strength of native iOS, the traps of over-abstraction, the role of testing and CI/CD as guardians of comprehensibility, and why "boring code" often endures longer than clever designs. Each story is a parable, each principle a reminder that the true measure of architecture is whether the human mind can still understand it.
And as the future arrives, AI will write code faster than any of us-but it cannot decide how humans should bear complexity. Architecture, trade-offs, and cultural boundaries remain ours to define. This book is not a manual but a map, a flag planted in the desert of complexity. It points in a single direction: make code human-friendly, so that your future self and your teammates will not lose their way.
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