New Jersey Style

December 28, 2025
By Aathreya Kadambi

My dad always mentioned the single responsibility principle around the house growing up, and recently since I’ve been meaning to improve my SWE/design (software engineering) capabilities, I was reading about these principles. SOLID seems like a good idea, and YAGNI is the perfect balancing force.

I found it funny that there’s this New Jersey style, which is also called the Berkeley or West Coast model. For reference, I’m also from New Jersey but live in Berkeley now. Apparently he contrasted it with an MIT style, but eh… I can see the merits of both. The guy was clearly yearning for some drama. 😂

But the idea of simplicity of interface versus simplicity of implementation is interesting; the latter is indeed easier to verify for the creation of big systems, but the former has a lower barrier to entry for new contributers (at least on the surface).

I wonder how our design principles and philosophies should change in the face of new tools like Cursor and Copilot.