Apollo 11
In honor of the completion of the Apollo 11 mission, I give you Margaret Hamilton, lead developer for the Apollo Guidance Computer software, and the AGC software itself. It's old (1969) and in assembly, but here it is.
In honor of the completion of the Apollo 11 mission, I give you Margaret Hamilton, lead developer for the Apollo Guidance Computer software, and the AGC software itself. It's old (1969) and in assembly, but here it is.
As Yoda would say, "Do. Or do not. There is no try"
Two things in computing are hard. Concurrency, Distributed Systems, and Off-By-One errors. You'd think reliably writing a file wouldn't be one of them, but you'd be wrong. Luckily much of the complexity is hidden from most of us by "the system", but you'd be surprised how much potentially leaks to user code.
Here's a topic for discussion. There was a recent twitter thread about the "10x Engineer". Does that person exist? Would you want to work with them? Is there a time and place for such a person?
Founders if you ever come across this rare breed of engineers, grab them. If you have a 10x engineer as part of your first few engineers, you increase the odds of your startup success significantly.
OK, here is a tough question.
How do you spot a 10x engineer?
Here's some even tougher questions. Are they really that good? Do they make everyone better, or do they get things done and leave a trail of barely working code and burned our engineers supporting their code behind them? Do you really want someone like that on your team?What does chocolate sauce have to do with bounded contexts and software design? Enquiring minds want to know.
For today, a link full of other links, including preparing for high-load days and why people got into programming.
It's a thing and we should care about it, but how does the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire relate to SRE?
I mentioned Conway's law last week, and that got me to doing some semi-random link following. I ran across a couple of articles on structuring the development of large systems so as to create bounded contexts and limit cognitive load and organizational refactoring to reducing organizational debt.
Not as much fun as the Steel Curtain, but a fairly light read with some deeper context. Who does Software Architecture?