Tasks running for two hours and counting. Sitting staring hoping. Dense showers of snow across the city again and again. A second mug of coffee, cooling down on a windowsill. Closing in on 8am, getting back on track.
(Verbindungsabbrüche, Inkonsistenzen, Ressourcenengpässe und dann erwacht der Geist aus seinen Traumbildern und versucht sich in die unmittelbare Jetztwelt des neuen Tages einzufinden, bevor Plan und Erfordernisse und ihre nachgelagerten Aktivitäten wieder zum Mittelpunkt der Betrachtungen werden. Die Vögel unter den Tannenästen protestieren gegen einander und gegen die weichende Nacht, Katze verweilt auf der Couch und ignoriert Morgen und Welt. Kaffeewasser, plötzliche erschrockene Erkenntnisse zu Nuancen, die dem Abend verborgen blieben. Geschichten von Suchen und Finden, allzeit im Entwurfsmodus und nie wirklich gut genug. Habt es mild heute.)
Manche Nächte sind wirre Übergänge von Gestern zu Heute. Hoffe, du kannst die erschrockenen Erkenntnisse zum Positiven verändern und bist mehr am Finden als am Suchen. Guten Morgen! 🥱☕
Late hours, after hours, overtime and both off track and in sync with things just one day into the week. Watching slow progress, linking different aspects of the same system and hoping for components to swing in soon. Window closed and still waiting for the room to feel warmer. The street's quiet and dark, the sky much brighter than expected and there's still that perception of soft grainy winter in and on everything. Have a soft night everyone wherever you are.
Madman or visionary? A little of both? A genius? A brand? A mensch? David Lynch was all these things and more, and this fan-made video above serves as a quick reminder of the career and the consistency of the film director/artist/transcendental medit…
Als sich die Künstlerin Paula Modersohn-Becker 1906 selbst als schwangere Frau porträtierte, war es der erste bekannte weibliche Selbstakt in der Kunst. Sie zog nach Worpswede, dann nach Paris und wieder zürück. (Ursendung: 30.3.2024)
Train commuters, temporary communities. Teenage boys in rough exchanges trying to impress teenage girls. An old couple carrying heavy bags and boxes. A distinguished businessman, in a black suit that on closer encounter looks weary and thin and bears the scent of railway stations and cheap booze. A sky in grey, no lines no clouds.
Auch an dicht gepackten Tagen finden sich Atempausen zwischen den Blöcken. Heute, hier, immer noch Neuschnee, der sich auf Dächern, Terrasse sammelt, und auf dem kleinen Tannenbaum, der im Januar samt Topf vor den Fenstern freigelassen wurde. Fokus lenken auf die Nasenspitze, die Leere über dem Kopf, den Raum oberhalb des Blechdaches unterhalb der Wolken. Tanzende Flocken tanzende Bilder, aber zumindest ohne Wind.
The job of engineers is not to deploy some technology but to build robust, reliable and sustainable (in all meanings of that word) solutions for real world problems based on requirements directly derived from people's needs. Even for an engineer technology comes second at best.
“In the soul of a true engineer, the only thing that really matters is being allowed to tinker in piece on something until it works” — attributed to a Lockheed Skunkworks engineer
@olyerickson Tinkerers specifications are intrinsic, which is the essence of joy.
Professional engineers may also enjoy their work mostly while still being bound to extrinsic specifications, which sometimes are frustrating as they are much harder to comply with.
In my experience, it's non-engineers who tend to focus on the tech and may need to be gently guided back to the problem they're trying to solve, from which a lot of engineers will look first for a simpler, less technical, or more general solution.
Then you are just throwing things together until it seems to work for some ill defined goal and conditions, not engineering software. Can be fun, but single use only.
Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (Montag, 16. Februar 2026, 13:38)
@Wyatt_H_Knott Perhaps for a junior engineering role, but I'd expect anyone in a more senior role to understand the context of the specification and the constraints that led to it, and where appropriate to discuss alternatives with the relevant stakeholders. With increasing seniority there should be a widening scope of awareness.
Sun Tsu's "The Art of War", specifically the section on Tactics, is surprisingly relevant in Software Engineering. You have a powerful army. Don't ask it to do something it can't do
@GerardThornley To this day they are rebooting f35 subsystems mid-flight when they bug out.
Not all software is trash-tier quality but we are nowhere close to the reliability and determinism you'd expect for any engineering field. And its not getting any better with all the deregulation and outsourcing to contractors.
@alatiera Then I think the phrase "don't have a single clue" might be putting it a little bit strongly!
For the software managing, for example, the timing of fuel injectors and spark plugs in all modern internal combustion engines, the engineers will have a very high (and justifiably high) level of confidence in how it will behave.
That's built on a great deal of work to measure things like the behaviour of raw materials (electronic components) including failure rates and conditions, model the behaviour of the system in a range of scenarios, and test the product at multiple stages during both design and manufacture. All the same processes that give confidence in the construction of a bridge.
In neither case will these efforts always manage to catch every single unintended outcome. A _fairly_ recent example would be the London millennium bridge, a footbridge over the Thames, which happened to have a resonant frequency at around people's walking pace, and had to have dampers added after construction to prevent an unpleasant rocking motion.
2. If you tag a pic with "nsfw", it’ll receive a special little NSFW UI treatment (blurred, and with an NSFW label), and in the RSS feed the text "NSFW" will appear in place of the image (but the link to the image will remain in place).
And since we’re talking NSFW stuff, here’s a link to the page with the some.pics community guidelines: home.omg.lol/info/picture-shar… 🙈
Request/response patterns. Expected determinism but the outcome falls rather short. Changing tenants, topics, projects, diving deep into peculiar details while trying to hold on tight to the overall context. Task lists flooded. Buzzwords unfiltered. Steering through haze, internal, external.
(Unsicherheiten, Terminketten, Abhängigkeiten über Kreuz und irgendwie scheinen sich zu viele Dinge gegenseitig zu blockieren. Herausforderungen einer Planung, wenn gerade die falschen Eckpunkte schon fix und unverhandelbar geworden sind. Herausforderungen einer Architektur, die eine kaum haltbare Fassade tragen soll. Hinter dieser Linie bleibt nur Kommunikation.)
Und schließlich wieder die Nacht loslassen. Gähnen, Seufzen, Haare in Form streichen. Rucksack für den Montag packen: Ladegerät, Notizbuch, Inselstein, einige noch brauchbare Erinnerungen, einige nicht vollständig aufgedachte Gedanken, ein paar Ambitionen und so viel Motivation, wie sich noch im Regal findet. Erster Kaffee, Fahrplan, Morgenstille. Und schon fast wieder unterwegs. Habt es mild heute.
9pm and not much further today. Merging realities. A roll of dices, a serene moment lost to music no one else should know about. A deep breath, ideas of ongoing winter and more frost in the trees, a visible agenda and a hidden gut feeling. Sleepy and overwhelmed, for a split second, by all the loose ends to catch up on, soon. A few chords and no voice, singing never works. Have a soft night wherever you are.
Maybe we should establish a "maintenance.md" practice just like "readme.md" or "LICENSE" where you just clearly outline the amount of maintenance the project/development team are planning to put into the code base and under which conditions. I have seen that a few times but maybe it should be more of a standard.
Different afternoon different roofs different silence and the proximity of soil and plants. Watching tiny birds, noticing mouses and cats in late night clips, avoiding chatter nearby. Sunrise to sunset but in a time frame of just a few hours.
Daniel (Not A Lawyer)
Als Antwort auf pokarim • • •That's a lot of Silly String.
@pokarim