All infra teams eventually become platforms. All product teams eventually become experiences. When viewed negatively this is called scope creep. I don’t know what it’s called when viewed positively but I expect the word “holistic” to be used unironically. The Rise of Platform Engineering | Hacker News

I am in trouble with my car, the voltage often goes up to 18 volts and you have to remove the engine to get at the alternator

vat brains often philosophize over whether they’re actually brains in bodies but usually dismiss it as absurd, why should for example someone go the trouble of engineering the human body and all the world around it as opposed to vats, it just totally fails occam’s razor

Most trees rely on symbiotic tribes of pixie engineers to grow large. Enter a springtime forest wearing pixie glasses and it’s a bustling construction site, covered in scaffolding, cranes, and endless activity

Random link from the archives: https://deniskyashif.com/implementing-a-regular-expression-engine/ originally archived Wed Mar 27 14:57:55 EDT 2019

CS programs encourage the idea (already common among students) that software engineers are professionals. First contact with the industry demonstrates that to the extent that folks have grown since graduation, its in their ability to delay the inevitable collapse of ugly hacks.

all the jokes you remember whose origins you don’t recall were precision engineered by cosmic coincidence control for the purpose of nooforming the mankind biocomputer change my mind

Some essays I wrote about engineering healthy community norms: https://medium.com/@/punk-cosplay-3005b5703c31?source=friends_link&sk=60b608b1bc983be2dbfa99ec0663a309 https://medium.com/@/on-communities-cf4ad1b6ce3?source=friends_link&sk=c1f309edbf7c6a010c746ca112459ac0 https://medium.com/@/context-centric-cultures-call-out-cultures-3da5e87015f1?source=friends_link&sk=44b692b40ec3ecd5ecbb918087bfb761

brand names precision-engineered as superstimuli of the noumenous and noetic flooding the used-car-market mindspace

When Good Engineers Write Bad Software - IEEE Spectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/reviews/when-good-engineers-write-bad-software

Cleanroom Software Engineering | Dr Dobb’s http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/cleanroom-software-engineering/184405405

Bad idea of the day: train chess engines to play like specific historic players

There is a bot for that | Search engine for bots https://thereisabotforthat.com/

Engineering Cyborg Ideology http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/engineering-cyborg-ideology/

Programmer as wizard, programmer as engineer https://www.tedinski.com/2018/03/20/wizarding-vs-engineering.html

An interesting alternative to my ‘big vs small computing’ distinction is the wizard vs engineer distinction discussed here: https://www.tedinski.com/2018/03/20/wizarding-vs-engineering.html

When you think about it, all search engines are human flesh search engines, except disjointed in time. fite me

Raildex spicy take from a magic practitioner with an engineering degree: watch Railgun all the way through and skip Magidex completely. Ignore Touma when he appears in Railgun. He has never once done anything interesting.

GitHub - boramalper/magnetico: Autonomous (self-hosted) BitTorrent DHT search engine suite. https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico

The Critical Engineering Manifesto https://criticalengineering.org/

Alan Kay Thesis: The Reactive Engine http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/pdfs/kay.htm

TempleOS: an educational tool for programming experiments - TechRepublic https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/software-engineer/templeos-an-educational-tool-for-programming-experiments/

Things Nobody Told Me About Being a Software Engineer · Ana Ulin https://anaulin.org/blog/things-nobody-told-me-about-being-a-software-engineer/

Better metaphors for community management than ‘social engineering’: ‘social gardening’, ‘social pickling’, ‘social brewing’, ‘social stewing’, ‘social mixtaping’

Engine Problems vs Crime Scene Problems: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/10/engine-problems-versus-crime-scene-problems/

Colour Clash: The Engineering Miracle of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Paleotronic Magazine https://paleotronic.com/2018/09/29/loading-ready-run-sinclair-edition-the-zx-spectrum/

TempleOS: an educational tool for programming experiments - TechRepublic https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/software-engineer/templeos-an-educational-tool-for-programming-experiments/

Migration successful. My page (http version) is now running on gopherproxy-c. Unfortunately not without functionality loss. If you used my site as search engine, you need to replace the smiley with “q”. The redirect is now handled by nginx and nginx can not read emoji variables.

Manifesto for Minimalist Software Engineers | Minifesto.org http://minifesto.org/

This is a very hot take and also not a new one but here we go: the goal of a properly functioning software engineer is to obviate themselves, not by solving the customer’s specific problems but by blurring the line between using a computer and programming one to the point where users can solve their own problems.

Solar eclipses are hard to come by on Earth but common in space, so offworld magical research stations modeled after orreries offer bespoke nights, engineered syzygies, and break new frontiers in topological astrology

Lazyweb: are there good horror movies about sound engineering / foley other than LFO and Berberian Sound Studio?

An Engineer’s Guide to the Docuverse “ Rococo Modem Basilisk ” Medium https://medium.com/@/an-engineers-guide-to-the-docuverse-d080cdbb73a6

The Shape of Code » Premium mediocrity is software engineering’s demographic http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2018/05/21/premium-mediocrity-is-software-engineerings-demographic/

Over-engineering is under-engineering “ Baldur Bjarnason https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/under-engineering-websites/

#xmpp muc search engine: https://muclumbus.jabbercat.org

When I say ‘luckily software has nothing to do with business’, what I mean is that software is uniquely positioned, compared to all other engineering, to be free of economies of scale: it is cheap to develop and has near zero cost of reproduction.

Probability Theory (For Scientists and Engineers) https://betanalpha.github.io/assets/case_studies/probability_theory.html

Alan Kay Thesis: The Reactive Engine http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/pdfs/kay.htm

Reminder that I have 2 essays on escaping path-dependence: https://medium.com/@/the-manufacture-of-steam-engine-time-9f83cd24a9b0 & https://medium.com/@/the-wtf-awards-sketching-a-map-to-an-escape-from-steam-engine-time-1bc4bd29c2e4

Google’s Selfish Ledger is an unsettling vision of Silicon Valley social engineering - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish-ledger-video-data-privacy

Impact Is Now Free & Open Source
My HTML5 Game Engine Impact launched almost 8 years ago. The last update was published in 2014. While Impact still works nicely in modern browsers, it lacks support for better graphic and sound APIs that are now available. I felt increasingly bad for selling a product that is hardly maintained or improved.

So as of today Impact will be available completely for free, published under the permissive MIT License.

Impact’s source is available on [gith … ⌘ Read more

@kas@enotty.dk, I didn’t think you are affiliated with it. Just wondered as I didn’t see what was special about it but I had to use a search engine to find out that the OS is Android. :D

Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaWFYm0kEw

Probability Theory (For Scientists and Engineers) https://betanalpha.github.io/assets/case_studies/probability_theory.html

A Taxonomy of Tech Debt | Riot Games Engineering https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debt

The manufacture of steam-engine time – Rococo Modem Basilisk – Medium https://medium.com/@/the-manufacture-of-steam-engine-time-9f83cd24a9b0

Programmer as wizard, programmer as engineer http://www.tedinski.com/2018/03/20/wizarding-vs-engineering.html

How to Hack an Engineer https://www.nemil.com/musings/hack-an-engineer.html

As a software engineer, being ignorant of sociology & psychology is just as bad as being ignorant of cryptography. Treat toxic communities the way you would treat any other security vulnerability: as an emergency.