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A physicist friend used to quote Rutherford, all science is either physics or stamp collecting. By which my friend meant, physics has a way of being checked by physical reality in a way that math or computer science don't. His area of work was extreme magnetic fields. Experimenting meant building giant copper coils, running enough current in them to melt them in place, and then very quickly detonating explosive aroun…
A physicist friend used to quote Rutherford, all science is either physics or stamp collecting. By which my friend meant, physics has a way of being checked by physical reality in a way that math or computer science don't. His area of work was extreme magnetic fields. Experimenting meant building giant copper coils, running enough current in them to melt them in place, and then very quickly detonating explosive aroun…
Explosively pumped flux compression generators [1] are fun!
That’s how real EMPs are made, in case anyone is interested in a career in super villainy but doesn’t know where to start.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_comp...
A physicist friend used to quote Rutherford, all science is either physics or stamp collecting. By which my friend meant, physics has a way of being checked by physical reality in a way that math or computer science don't. His area of work was extreme magnetic fields. Experimenting meant building giant copper coils, running enough current in them to melt them in place, and then very quickly detonating explosive aroun…
Leave it to a physicist to misinterpret that quotation.
I giggled at the end. Just yesterday, we solved an issue that plagued the company for 3 years. For us it was the letter 'A'. Someone had been doing manual fixes inserting and removing data for the past 3 years. It became part of his job. He added a recurring event in his calendar just to do that regular clean up. Millions of customers depended on this one individual making sure they had the correct data plan on their…
'What have you done? You solved the case that put our entire family through law school!'
That poor soul is no longer indispensable. I am only half joking. Software is about making things more efficient, but I like to look at the human motivations.
> While many other professions struggle to understand and resolve their issues, we have the advantage of being able to experiment multiple times a day with just a few clicks.
So much strained positivity, as if the author was tasked to find something to be thankful for. Look, software engineering is a great job if you enjoy the work. But even in this parable, the problem is the author's week of distress and flailing. It has nothing to do with the work and everything to do with the author.
All the others he turns towards, no matter their discipline, their tools for investigation, or the constraints they faced in a dilemma, relate stories where they have a mature understanding of how their industry works and how they navigate its system. They encounter problems in the course of their work and they resolve them in the course of their work. Maybe it takes a little while to proceed with diagnosis. Maybe it takes a long while to integrate improvements into a later product. Maybe they need to forgo some procedure that they prefer to use.
By the authors account, the embedded engineer, the hardware engineer, the CEO and veterinarian all face greater challenges when solving problems in their work, yet they all speak of their road through those challenges with a confidence that the author lacks. They try to soothe the author and empathize, but none of their stories hint at a week of panicked flailing.
So if they handle their work so much more confidently, is it true that their dilemmas are worse and that the author is lucky to be a software engineer?
If the author listened to their own invented characters, the realization to come to is not that the author is lucky to work in a field with purported "privileges" and that everyone else has it worse (gross!), but that everyone faces dilemmas in their work and that the real skill is in staying cool and confidently relying on the processes of their discipline. And this has everything to do with the person doing the work and nothing to do with the discipline. The realization is that challenges arise in all professions and that you can proceed through them without distress and flailing if you allow yourself patience and confidence.
It's funny because they wrote this as a parable, but they missed the real lesson in the very piece they wrote. Four people reassure them that "We've been there! We all go through this!" and their takeaway is "I need to remember that I'm lucky and that everybody else has it even worse."
> I sent a message to my friend, "Cracked it at last. It was the letter 'E'." Funny how the simplest, tiniest bugs are often the hardest to find. Just this morning I burned an hour or two hunting down an off-by-one error. Turns out it was an "index + 1" that I had forgotten to change when I refactored (facepalm).
As a software engineer I always kinda enjoyed debugging. It allowed me to use a different skill and mind set than creating designs and implementing them. Not to say I didn't get stressed out debugging. I had one demo while developing software for AT&T's 5ESS telephone switch. We had only one phone line in the test lab configured for our feature. Attempt after attempt the software just wouldn't work. Knowing the softw…
> As a software engineer I always kinda enjoyed debugging. It allowed me to use a different skill and mind set than creating designs and implementing them. Same here. I always enjoyed the challenge of it, especially in complicated systems.
You need to spot unusual behavior, figure out ways to isolate and reproduce it, come up with hypotheses as to what might be happening, design tests for those hypotheses, run the tests, find the solution, test the solution -- exactly like the interplay of experimental and theoretical science.
The dog’s owner paid for surgery, but wouldn’t pay for an x-ray?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of those things I wouldn't suggest you solve with the "roll your own" approach. There are some good libraries out there that will handle this and more. Uppy is one that comes to mind. I created and maintained another popular one for 7 years that i sunset in 2017.
Currently using react-dropzone seems to solve most of the major issues for me. Use that to get a signed URL via API, then upload from client to image server directly.