Software “Engineering”

-
/via https://consolia-comic.com/comics/house
When you’re out there building bridges, dams, skyscrapers, and whatnot, there is a lot of formalism that is baked into the assumptions. You don’t start the whole damn thing from scratch (“We should google ‘load-bearing struts’, no?”), or worse, assume that it can be worked out in process (“You don’t know what a stress-strain curve is? That’s ok, you can figure it out as you go along”).
If anything, the burden of proof on anything new (“I plan on using plastic straws instead of steel in skyscrapers!”) is extremely high, and spread across a whole bunch of areas. From Code, to regulations, to professional certifications, to permitting, if you want to do something that is new and different, well, you need to have your shit together.
This, mind you, in direct opposition to most Software Engineering, where #CowboyDevelopers roam the earth asserting their Dunning-Kruger infused superiority…
Also, I really, really want there to be a BrickOverflow…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her...
Read more

Cannonball Tree!

-
Image
Spotted this one just outside the Ravindra Kalakshetra in Bangalore .  Its called the Cannonball Tree , but is - technically (i.e., in Latin, if thats your metier) - Couroupita Guianensis , or ನಾಗಲಿಂಗ ಪುಷ್ಪಾ  in Kannada. The fruits look like Cannonballs (well, d-uh), and the flowers are really quite amazing, and pretty ludicrously distinctive...
Read more