Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]
1–10 of 114 posts
Re: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]
#2While this PDF might be new, Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design dates back to 2003.
https://web.archive.org/web/20031101212246/https://spacecraf...
Re: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]
#3The first law already gives a good reason why software "engineering" is rarely actually engineering.
Re: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]
#4The first law already gives a good reason why software "engineering" is rarely actually engineering.
Almost all the laws are great guidance for Software dev to be honest and idiomatic to a lot of what's banded around today as good practice.
Re: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]
#5I like systems that are maintence free and easily replaceable. My experience so far in software engineering is that technologies die, so it should also be easy to replace the tecnology, like the hardware it runs on, the platform/os, the programming language and the framework.
Re: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]
#6TL;DR:
Minimize negative(painful) notions as much as possible, ideally approaching zero, while maximizing positive (pleasurable) notions.
Minimize negative(painful) notions: Uncertainty, Risk, Chaotic behavior, Randomness, Non-deterministic, Instability, Cost, Energy losses, Time consumption, Resource usage, Excessive complexity, Failure modes, Noise
Maximize positive(Pleasure) notions: Reliability, Efficiency, Deterministic, Predictability, Precision, Accuracy, Verification, Validation, Safety, Stability, Simplicity (lower complexity), Robustness, Redundancy
Re: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]
#7TL;DR: Minimize negative(painful) notions as much as possible, ideally approaching zero, while maximizing positive (pleasurable) notions. Minimize negative(painful) notions: Uncertainty, Risk, Chaotic behavior, Randomness, Non-deterministic, Instability, Cost, Energy losses, Time consumption, Resource usage, Excessive complexity, Failure modes, Noise Maximize positive(Pleasure) notions: Reliability, Efficiency, Deter…
I can think of a few SaaS products in the document scanning and OCR space whose UIs are not efficient or simple, while being time consuming and, to my mind, chaotic.
There should be an Akin Exit Clause from said 3-year contracts. They have zero incentives to fix or improve _anything_ during those years of servitude.
Re: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]
#8The last and most important slide is missing.
"Ignore all the advise above and do the right thing Subtext: This will take multiple lifetimes to accomplish"
This is particularly important considering that some of the advice is at odds with each other and engineering is an unending juggling of tradeoffs. It's also by far the hardest to achieve both technically and socially but worth striving for.
Re: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]
#9> Bhargava’s Law: Only 1 out of 10 research ideas
make it into industrial practice
It's a nice reflection, but what is the origin of this? Can't find another reference to this "law" online.
Re: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]
#10Law 20 seems to express the state of most startups these days:
> "A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."