HackerTube.dev

Stuart Halloway - Narcissistic Design

Reaktor · 28.7K views · 2017-02-20 · 37:15

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

Stuart Halloway's satirical talk describes how to protect yourself from industry change by spreading complexity through systems while following idiomatic practice. It uses this inversion to catalog software design anti-patterns.

On Hacker News

HN commenters love it as a witty and insightful tour of design anti-patterns, applicable to DSLs, OOP and API design.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2018–2021

Topics

Software architecture & designFunctional programmingSatire & parody
Search by tags
software designcomplexityanti-patternsclojuremaintainability

What people said

smnplk · 2018-11 · Strong recommendation

Reading some of the comments here reminded me of a great talk by Stuart Halloway called Narcissistic Design.[1] [1] [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗
ajss · 2018-08 · Strong recommendation

Along a similar line, I love Stuart Halloway's talk on Narcissistic Design - [VIDEO] Prefer APIs over data. Start with DSLs. Always connect (and never enqueue). Create abstractions for information. Use static typing across subsystem boundaries. Put language semantics on the wire. Write lots of unit tests. Leverage context. Update information in place.

Read the original HN comment ↗
blacktriangle · 2021-07 · Recommendation

[VIDEO] This talk goes into many anti-patterns, but he gets to the real problem with SQL, that it is ONLY a DSL and lacks either an API or a fundamental information model to program against. Composability when working with a DSL is a nightmare. I also have been moving away from ORM to directly writing SQL, but lets be honest about the reasons that programmers are wary of working directly with SQL as they are legitimate issues.

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by Reaktor, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks
  • SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
  • Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources