Friday, February 27, 2015

Architects, engineers?

Delightful passage from Sam Newman's new book, Building Microservices:

Part of us wants recognition, so we borrow names from other professions that already have the recognition we as an industry crave. But this can be doubly harmful. First, it implies we know what we are doing, when we plainly don’t. I wouldn’t say that buildings and bridges never fall down, but they fall down much less than the number of times our programs will crash, making comparisons with engineers quite unfair. Second, the analogies break down very quickly when given even a cursory glance. To turn things around, if bridge building were like programming, halfway through we’d find out that the far bank was now 50 meters farther out, that it was actually mud rather than granite, and that rather than building a footbridge we were instead building a road bridge. Our software isn’t constrained by the same physical rules that real architects or engineers have to deal with, and what we create is designed to flex and adapt and evolve with user requirements.

A lot of times I really don't understand my own job.

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