Software Engineering is invisible.

I was looking at a small dam the other day and I was marveling at the engineering. It was raining a lot and a couple of gates were lifted to release the water. Water was gushing through the open gates, sending out ripples on one side and foaming on the other. If not for the traffic, it sounded like a beach, water breaking on the sand. Feynman once said that understanding the science underlying nature only makes it more beautiful. It goes the same for man-made structures, in my opinion.

My thoughts drifted to thinking about the civil and mechanical engineers who were part of the construction effort of this dam. Even though it's not the biggest, it's a significantly large structure in the area, something definitely to be proud of. Passersby might, every so often, appreciate the structure, it's resilience and it's grandiose.

Civil and mechanical engineers have that advantage. If they choose to, their work is front and center in people's eyes. Civil engineers can design and build structures that take your breath away. Think bridges. Mechanical engineers can work on machines whose complexity is mind-boggling. Think an airplane engine. That's not the case with Software Engineering though. Which is the point I'm trying to make.

The software used to design the bridge isn't visible to the common man. Same with the software used to study an airplane engine design.

Heck. What I consider mankind's biggest achievement, putting a man on the moon, needed software to help with everything from navigation to control systems. And the only way a common man can comprehend the complexity of the software used is to look at how high the stack of papers were.

  
If you peak underneath the world as it is today, you'll find a lot of computer code. But compared to everything else that's helping the world run smoothly, it's probably the hardest thing for a common man to comprehend.

From a software point of view, you could blame the software engineers and the field for the complexity of the software. You could say that standardization is what's missing from the field. Maybe the field is too nascent for standarization. Maybe the complexity will go reduce over time.

But, it's still such a shame that I can marvel at the complexity of software but can't adequately help another human comprehend it.

Popular posts from this blog

Farewell to Enthought

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage ...
Read more

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these...
Read more

Elementary (particle physics), my dear Watson

Ground Control to Major Tom:  Shruti Patel checking in. Since my dear friend and fellow-physicist Rahul Poruri is homeward bound, and shall remain there for a week, I'm stepping in to continue his tradition of daily posts to Astronut . Even as I write, I'm not quite sure what this post is going to be about, so please forgive me for occasional rants and digressions.  By the way Rahul, I totally resent you for the name of this blog- I'm never going to start my own blog because there's no way I'll come up with a name as cool as Astronut! For now, I shall try and be happy with being a guest writer! Before I begin, a little bit on who I am and what I do; so that you can trust that my general views on science- particle physics in particular- are not entirely baseless. I graduated with a masters in Physics from IIT Madras in July this year, and I'm currently working towards (an eventual) PhD with the Theory Group at the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY)...
Read more