Engineering

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is the full expression of what "You and Your Research" outlined. It's a book about thinking; more specifically, a style of thinking by which great ideas are conceived.

It’s hard to even articulate this scenario with words and pictures. Sometimes you just have to feel it, use it, to understand the nuances.

This all might seem obvious — but the obvious is not always implemented. Sometimes it’s not as obvious as you might think. And sometimes the obvious is just too much work, so it gets skipped.

The point is: look and feel is hard to design, let alone spec, in a design tool. You need someone who understands what’s possible in the medium (and I mean the medium you’ll deliver the interaction in, not the medium you’ll design it in — those can be different).

You need someone who can do design work with code.

...You need either:

1. a person who understands and can work in both forms, or
2. two people who can work closely together to nail down all these details and make decisions along the way until you have something that feels right, that feels intentional, that feels designed all the way through — not “designed” then “implemented”.

If you believe NASA, late in 2026 Americans will walk on the moon again. That proposed mission is called Artemis 3, and its lunar segment looks a lot like Apollo 17 without the space car. Two astronauts will land on the moon, collect rocks, take selfies, and about a week after landing rejoin their orbiting colleagues to go back to Earth.

But where Apollo 17 launched on a single rocket and cost $3.3 billion (in 2023 dollars), the first Artemis landing involves a dozen or two heavy rocket launches and costs so much that NASA refuses to give a figure (one veteran of NASA budgeting estimates it at $7-10 billion). The single-use lander for the mission will be the heaviest spacecraft ever flown, and yet the mission's scientific return—a small box of rocks—is less than what came home on Apollo 17. And the whole plan hinges on technologies that haven't been invented yet becoming reliable and practical within the next eighteen months.

...Advocates for Artemis insist that the program is more than Apollo 2.0. But as we’ll see, Artemis can't even measure up to Apollo 1.0. It costs more, does less, flies less frequently, and exposes crews to risks that the steely-eyed missile men of the Apollo era found unacceptable. It's as if Ford in 2024 released a new model car that was slower, more accident-prone, and ten times more expensive than the Model T.

I believe the way most organizations produce digital products is fundamentally broken. The elephant in the room is a dated understanding of the role of both design and engineering, which in turn shapes how organizations hire, manage, and produce digital things. These companies invest billions of dollars building teams, processes, and tools on top of an immature discipline and an outdated waterfall model that ends up being detrimental to productivity, team happiness, and ultimately, the resulting experiences we bring to life.

There is a disconnect between product design and product engineering.

[Atkinson] was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

So I'd like you to think about when was the last time you thought about something for an entire hour? Like nobody bothered you and you had an idea and you sat for an hour and thought about it. How about for a whole day? Does everybody remember the last time they sat and thought about something for a whole day? How about over a course of a month? You had something you were working on and obviously, not spending all the time every day when you started thinking for a month. Or a year? These are tremendously valuable moments if you get to have them at all. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the ability to think about probably three different things for a year or more.

1. Make the requirement less dumb.
2. Try to delete part of the process.
3. Simplify and optimize.
4. Accelerate cycle time.
5. Automate.

I’m not a “[full-stack] developer”, regardless of what my last job title says.

I’m not even a front-end developer, thanks to the JavaScript–industrial complex.

I’m a front-of-the-front-end developer, but that’s too long.

So, I’m a web designer. And I also specialise in accessibility, design systems, and design.

...The current landscape of front-end development presents challenges for web designers like me. As I navigate through the complexities of our industry, I will continue to advocate for the importance of expertise in these undervalued areas.

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.

Design Engineer is the latest label we're chucking onto the pile of obfuscatory design titles alongside interface designer, interaction designer, software designer, web designer, product designer, design systems architect, UI/UX designer, UX engineer, UI engineer, and front-of-the-front-end engineer.

...Throwing this extra label onto the pile feels necessary though. Design engineer captures something simple, important, and worth distinguishing: a person who sits squarely at the intersection of design and engineering, and works to bridge the gap between them.

In [Jim Nielsen's post on design engineering] he shares an example of what a Design Engineer could bring to the table and I adore everything about this. This is the stuff I love spending hours and hours on to get right. For most of my career I was dependent on a developer who put up with me and my dEsIgN-eXcElLeNcY shenanigans. It's hard to find frontend devs with an appreciation for this kind of work and even if you find them, there's still an obvious translation layer that can be a barrier between vision and result.

Progress is an ongoing act of myth-making. Most of the time the true story is a mixed one. Things are lost. Others gained. A happy ending is when you come out ahead. A story full of setbacks is a tragedy.

It feels like we’re experiencing more setbacks than progress in software and tech at the moment.

...Between the obvious cycle triggered by the lay-offs and the generally inhospitable environment that the software industry has evolved into, it’s hard to feel excited or motivated by software development.

And we do need to feel motivated, at least in part. The word “passion” is almost always a red flag for any given industry, but software development is a creative business. You may all go around cosplaying engineers, but your average coder is about as close to being an engineer as a fan cosplaying as Hugh Laurie playing House is to being a medical doctor.

Software is a creative industry with more in common with media production industries than housebuilding.

As such, a baseline intrinsically-motivated curiosity about the form is one of the most powerful assets you can have when doing your job. It helps you solve problems and come up with new ideas.

The current cycle of decline and disinvestment in people makes that hard – probably next to impossible – but we can try to find our own ways forward where we can.

I believe that really good products have at least one person behind them who's spotting all of the goofiness and is having some success in getting those things ironed out. It's not enough to just notice them, and it's not enough to do the kind of gunky eng work it takes to find out why something happened or how it broke.

Whoever does this work has to actually have traction in the organization so that these problems will actually be fixed. Otherwise, the first two parts have no real value, and only serve to burn out whoever's making the attempts.

I'd love to do this kind of work for a place that truly cares about it, to the point of providing air cover to those who are tasked with finding the problems. If the company doesn't actually care, that's "fine". Don't hire people who are tasked with trying to improve those things, then if there's a hypocrisy gap in your engineering culture.

Design has very little to do with what tools or methodologies you use, or what your job title is, or what you have a degree in, or even anything like “creativity”; design is about your relationship to constraints. Rather: to what extent are you defining constraints rather than just obeying them? Design is about taking a universe of possibilities and converging onto exactly one outcome. Being handed a set of constraints which you treat like immutable laws of physics (because many of them are) and solving within that envelope is what engineering is. To wit: what most designers are doing most of the time is actually a form of engineering, and engineers are always doing at least some design.

This is because genuine design—the power to define constraints—is a privileged political position within an organization, and not everybody can occupy it. In other words, the “seat at the table” comes first. Design is Steve Jobs infamously dropping an iPod prototype into his fish tank, pointing at the bubbles coming out and yelling at his staff to make it thinner. It doesn’t matter what your title is; Jobs is the designer in that scenario.

Four years ago, I wrote that the SLS was a cripplingly embarrassing national failure and a tragedy waiting to happen. That remains true, of course, but now I will go further and underscore that by continuing to humor this monstrosity, NASA has squandered its technical integrity and credibility.

...Just imagine the mental agility required to actually want to work for an agency that continues to insist on technical doctrine no less absurd than “2+2=5” from top to bottom, from onboarding documentation all the way up to press releases, bilateral agreements and policy papers. Everyone at NASA knows the SLS is a looming catastrophe, but no-one can say it.

Dieste's unique and innovative method of design, a melding of architecture and engineering, elevated these often humble buildings to masterworks of art.

The chief of Emirates, one of Boeing’s largest clients, has said the crisis-stricken US aircraft maker should ensure its new chief executive has engineering experience to restore safety standards.

A day after Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun announced he would step down, Sir Tim Clark also said he backed efforts by the US group’s largest labour union to win a seat on the board.

“To fix Boeing’s issues the company needs a strong engineering lead as its head coupled to a governance model which prioritises safety and quality,” Clark told the Financial Times on Tuesday.

Engineers are especially susceptible to tearing down Chesterton's Fence, simply because they have been so successful doing it for so long. Many processes could be immediately improved just by making them digital. But understanding why a fence was put up in the first place is always a good exercise to start with.

Larry Page famously fired all the product managers at Google in 2001. Why should engineers have to report to someone less technical? At first glance, not a terrible idea. How many of us have had non-technical product managers who fail to fundamentally understand a technical product? In practice, it was a decision that was quickly reversed.

Chesterton's fence is a concept that's closely related to the Lindy Effect – things that have been around longer tend to have a longer future life expectancy. These things are more likely to have an important underlying reason why they exist – and as a result of their longevity, that reason is often forgotten or not known to new generations.

For many things, I believe we have to figure them out ourselves from first principles. But Chesterton's fence gives us a good counterbalance to prematurely changing things that we don't immediately agree with.

It would be well if engineering were less generally thought of, and even defined, as the art of constructing. In a certain important sense it is rather the art of not constructing: or, to define it rudely, but not inaptly, it is the art of doing well with one dollar that which any bungler can do with two.

Enthusiasm for the Apollo program tends to be focused on the astronauts who piloted the spacecraft, and on the NASA mission control staff that managed the flights from the ground. Comparatively less focus is placed on the actual construction of the Apollo spacecraft and the rockets that put them into orbit. Everyone knows who Neil Armstrong is, but almost no one knows who built the Eagle lander that carried him to the lunar surface (it was Grumman Aerospace). In fictional treatments like the movie First Man, the rocket is simply there, ready and waiting for the astronauts to take their historic flight.

But the astronauts, and NASA, were just the tip of an enormous iceberg of industrial infrastructure, made up of 400,000 workers and 20,000 individual contractors that designed and built the various rockets and spacecraft of the Apollo program.

The Engineering Language is something that I would consider to be a living embodiment of how engineers speak, think about, describe, and express what they think in that problem domain. It’s not a programming language, or a DSL; it’s similar to a Design Language, but for software engineering and architecture more directly. The Engineering Language is the tool that you use to build foundations of thought and mental models and concepts themselves, so that one can coordinate the intangible nothingness of abstraction itself.

I think this Engineering Language is comprised of three things: An abstraction language, a protocol language, and an interface language. Together, those three things make up something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

+10x engineers may be mythical, but -10x engineers exist.

To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week.

Is software engineering “really” engineering? A lot of us call ourselves software engineers. Do we deserve that title? Are we mere pretenders to the idea of engineering? This is an important question, and like all important questions, it regularly sparks arguments online.

Collections of articles, links, and other material from around the web, relevant to software design and engineering.

The long-term popularity of any given tool for software development is proportional to how much labour arbitrage it enables.

The more effective it is at enabling labour arbitrage, the more funding and adoption it gets from management.

...React and the component model standardises the software developer and reduces their individual bargaining power excluding them from a proportional share in the gains. Its popularity among executives and management is entirely down to the fact that it helps them erase the various specialities – CSS, accessibility, standard JavaScript in the browser, to name a few – from the job market. Those specialities might still exist in practice – as ad hoc and informal requirements during teamwork – but, as far as employment is concerned, they’re such a small part of the overall developer job market that they might as well be extinct.

The component model itself is another layer of arbitrage, especially when coupled with CSS-in-JS approaches or libraries such as Tailwind. Instead of building teams around cross-functional specialities, you can build your software around interchangeable components.

General Systemantics (retitled to Systemantics in its second edition and The Systems Bible in its third) is a systems engineering treatise by John Gall in which he offers practical principles of systems design based on experience and anecdotes.

It is offered from the perspective of how not to design systems, based on system engineering failures. The primary precept of the treatise is that large complex systems are extremely difficult to design correctly despite best intentions, so care must be taken to design smaller, less-complex systems and to do so with incremental functionality based on close and continual touch with user needs and measures of effectiveness.

When we think of bridges, it is the dramatic and monumental long spans that come to mind first, especially the lithe suspension bridges such as the Golden Gate and the pure geometric arches such as Sydney Harbour. But the majority of bridges are not such spectacular structures. Most of them are ordinary overpasses, with spans of 30 or 40 feet, carrying roadways or rails across other thoroughfares or over small streams. You see such bridges by the dozen on any drive down the Interstate. They may be lacking in glamour, but they are more representative of a bridge builder's art.

The engineering and construction of girder bridges are pretty routine these days, but the bridges are not quite standard items you order from a catalogue. The girders, whether of steel or concrete, are custom-build for each bridge, then trucked to the site and hoisted into place with a crane. The designer still has scope for variation and creativity, and it shows out on the highways: some overpasses are prettier than others.

Textbooks on water-system engineering state that supply mains are generally installed on the north side of the street in the Northern Hemisphere and on the south side in the Southern Hemisphere, so that the sun will warm them. In both hemispheres they are supposed to be on the east side of north-south streets, on the premise that the afternoon sun is warmer than the morning sun.

Bridges make connections; they bring people together—a role that has made them a traditional emblem of friendship. Consider the town of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina. When fighting between ethnic factions broke out there in the 1990s, nothing symbolized the social disintegration more clearly than the destruction of a sixteenth-century stone-arch bridge that had linked the two parts of the town on opposite banks of the Neretva River. And the emblem of efforts to heal the divisions is a rebuilt bridge, opened with fireworks and fanfare in July of 2004.

What's the point of that story, you may ask? It's that if you piss me off enough, I will literally study the blade while you talk about Agile all day.

...There's a fine line to walk when it comes to being anger-fueled. When it's done with bitterness, you lose your edge and simply do things that are emotionally satisfying but tactically unsound.

People are afraid to let design have time to actually figure out the right thing to make, because "whatever will the engineers do?" – fuck you, there's plenty for the engineers to do. Go fix some technical debt. Go fix those 700 bugs that you de-prioritized or marked as won't fix because you're an asshole.

I'm sorry, I love engineers. I don't know why I'm yelling at them. But you know, there's plenty for the engineers to do. There's all sorts of cleanup. They can work on dev-ops stuff! They can work on their build process! Make it faster! I'm not worried about keeping the engineers busy. If you think that the only thing that engineers can do is build yet another stupid feature that nobody is going to use, then you're a garbage designer and you should quit.

...Happy 2020 everybody!

Artists are only creative for 10 years...we engineers are no different. Live your 10 years to the full.