The Gravity Problem

Every system has a center of gravity—something everything else ends up orbiting. Find the center and you understand the system.

What a system’s “center of gravity” means

• core dependency, dominant force

Examples in software

• the schema, the API, the queue

How gravity shapes decisions

• constraints, timelines, priorities

Identifying the wrong gravity source

• when the least stable part becomes the core

Rebalancing a system’s gravity

• refactors, reorganizations, rewrites