From the Physical to the Non-Physical

    More than 4,500 years ago one of man's most important contributions to the world was born: engineering. Every year since important insights were gleaned and lessons learned. Sometimes through recorded history the efforts were far from a success. However, all of these lessons learned have culminated and grown into arguably one of the most successful sciences the world has ever known. Everyday around the world billions of people use the buildings, bridges, ships, and other physical infrastructure designed and produced by engineers. Every single one of these examples of physical engineering build upon thousands of years of experience and knowledge. Consequently, when somebody walks or drives over a modern bridge spanning a 100 foot deep river there is no second thought as to whether it will hold your weight; we take its design and structural soundness for granted. To be sure, it was not always this way. Imagine for a minute the first time that an enterprising hunter was faced with crossing a rushing stream to, no doubt, continue his hunting in a more bountiful forest. Being as resourceful as possible, he notices a large tree near the bank and determines that if he cut it down it would easily reach the other bank. He toils for hours to finally chop the tree down and finds that it does indeed easily span the river. Much delighted, he continues his hunt and is rewarded justly with an abundance of food. Understandably, he is quite pleased with himself until he rounds the bend on his way home and finds his makeshift bridge. It is getting late and his children are getting hungry. He decides to take a risk and starts to walk carefully with his heavy bounty from the day across the tree trunk. It's not long until the weight is too much for the tree and it cracks loudly underneath the hunter, sending him plummeting into the river below.

    I think that there are very important and fundamental parallels between the histories of physical engineering (those disciplines encompassing civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and the like.) and software engineering. While physical engineers have had several millenia to learn from their mistakes, software engineers have had a mere 50 years. I want to liken the hunter's primitive solution to solving his problem to our attempts at solving a similar fundamental problem: meeting all of our user's needs. There is much to learn in the study of the history of physical engineering; many ideas and lessons are found that can benefit a software engineer today. I want to analyze and discuss these lessons and how they affect modern software design. Immense progress has been made in our profession the past few decades, but I hope that with a fresh perspective we can focus our progress into solutions that not only solve problems but change the way people work.

    I started this blog to give me a medium to discuss the ideas that will define our science in the coming years. I see a very important shift on the horizon and I find it very exciting that we all get to be part of it. With the advent of the Web 2.0 companies and the continual redefinition of how we use the web, and how we get things done on a day-to-day basis, there is a renaissance of ideas and solutions. Some may define this as just a second dot-com bubble. I think that it might just turn out to be a bit more deeply rooted than that. Lets see what happens.