See, treating this as an add-on is why software has a reputation as "not real engineering". Engineering is all about turning science into products . Anyone with a chemical lab and enough post-grad grunt can make a compound. That's just the start. Getting it to customers, at scale, with a saleable price and not selling poison, contamination, or thin air and not turning your plant into a crater or superfund site is the…
> Anyone with a chemical lab...not turning your plant into a crater or superfund site...how could we know it would be hard to make 50 tons of FOOF a day? For additional context to the mental imagery, I thought it would be appropriate to link FOOF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride
What is negative engineering?
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: What is negative engineering?
#12Isn't what the article describes the concept of "defensive programming"?
Re: What is negative engineering?
#13See, treating this as an add-on is why software has a reputation as "not real engineering". Engineering is all about turning science into products . Anyone with a chemical lab and enough post-grad grunt can make a compound. That's just the start. Getting it to customers, at scale, with a saleable price and not selling poison, contamination, or thin air and not turning your plant into a crater or superfund site is the…
I found this example particularly engaging.
I would not be comfortable shipping code that has undefined behavior, outcome, or consequence. It takes a small amount of effort to build functions/methods with defined but encompassing outputs.
Although complexity probably scales parabolically in certain use cases.
Re: What is negative engineering?
#14> They _insure_ the outcomes that positive engineering tools are used to achieve. Ugh such a tacky abuse of words. Context around that sentence implies it should be "ensure". No, this is just yet another ad promoting gimmicky work for consultants to sell. I understand HN is definitely the place to post this stuff, but I was expecting something more interesting.
The context around that sentence does quite explicitly intends to insure the outcomes because you can't really ensure it. I mean, the paragraph literally starts with "Insurance as code”.
You insure _against_ something. You ensure something. GP is right.
Re: What is negative engineering?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
The context around that sentence does quite explicitly intends to insure the outcomes because you can't really ensure it. I mean, the paragraph literally starts with "Insurance as code”.
You insure _against_ something. You ensure something. GP is right.
If you're talking about the grammar, then the phrase "My car is insured" is fine. You aren't required to specify what it's insured against; that can be left implicit.
If you're talking about the language, insurance is wrong: retries do ensure positive outcomes. However, assurance is wrong as well: unlike retries, observability tools don't ensure positive outcomes, they just mitigate the negative ones.
It's just bad writing, using a tortured metaphor to explain a definition that doesn't make any sense.
Re: What is negative engineering?
#16Fyi ... other related terminology ... "chaos monkeys" engineering from Netflix, designing for "fault tolerance" , etc. See list from : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering#See_also
Another list is "cross-cutting concerns" which can include error-detection & correction, process monitoring, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-cutting_concern#Examples
And "site reliability engineering" popularized by Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_reliability_engineering
Re: What is negative engineering?
#17I'm a negative engineer.
Re: What is negative engineering?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
The context around that sentence does quite explicitly intends to insure the outcomes because you can't really ensure it. I mean, the paragraph literally starts with "Insurance as code”.
You insure _against_ something. You ensure something. GP is right.
You also drink ensure, if you're old enough.
Re: What is negative engineering?
#19See, treating this as an add-on is why software has a reputation as "not real engineering". Engineering is all about turning science into products . Anyone with a chemical lab and enough post-grad grunt can make a compound. That's just the start. Getting it to customers, at scale, with a saleable price and not selling poison, contamination, or thin air and not turning your plant into a crater or superfund site is the…
I don't understand this kind of inferiority complex. In software engineering we can often afford to wing it in a way that other kinds of engineering can't because they are strongly locked into what they've built already and because human life is at play. You can't really redo the foundation of a pre-existing building without a truly heroic amount of work, and you can't reboot a person if their pacemaker fails. When presented with those same conditions, software engineering tends to be just as rigorous as any other kind of engineering, e.g. NASA, medical software, and so on. I'd argue that is what defines engineering: you optimize for the things that matter and don't get carried away trying to pursue the most elegant or robust system at all costs – that would be science or art. Your competitor who is not cutting corners won't beat you with their 99.9% product, they will just never get off the ground. Meanwhile, you're at 99.5% and climbing.
Re: What is negative engineering?
#20See, treating this as an add-on is why software has a reputation as "not real engineering". Engineering is all about turning science into products . Anyone with a chemical lab and enough post-grad grunt can make a compound. That's just the start. Getting it to customers, at scale, with a saleable price and not selling poison, contamination, or thin air and not turning your plant into a crater or superfund site is the…
> See, treating this as an add-on is why software has a reputation as "not real engineering".
Software is way more of a craft than engineering.