The increasing value of domain knowledge

A dovetail joint requires expertise but can allow for glue and nails to be done away with.

A lot of the work done in software engineering is menial. Often the profession is portrayed as people solving the complex problems that are posed in the academic discipline of computer science, and don’t get me wrong, having a foundational understanding of computer science upon which to develop your craft is important. It helps you to understand why some of the frustrations exist and to, although not often the case anymore, optimise code to be performant enough for a given task.



Software engineering has always been the craft of translating the spirit of a requirements document (or sentiment of the client) into a language free of ambiguity for the machine to understand.

The shift in grammatical style from English (or any other natural language) to that of a particular programming language notwithstanding almost the entirety of the job of a developer is providing clarification. Moreover providing clarification of the ambiguities in the job description in a clear way, that doesn’t become cluttered over time.



Any code that runs has chosen a path down this disambiguation process and problems arise when that path has been chosen incorrectly. That leads to a kind of bug automated testing can’t pick out. A bug that the IDE is unlikely to be able to ever provide assistance on.

Generally accepted practices can reduce the workload by making the task of disambiguation smaller. Take sorting, for example, this was a task that would have to be coded out in a way that best worked for the developer coding it for whatever task they needed. Higher-level languages include this as a built-in function where the developer doesn’t have to make the choice about the underlying mechanism. A similar thing is the case with serialization and JSON. By creating a standardised serialisation mechanism (Albeit not always sufficient) developers can simply call the library functions rather than come up with their own system of sterilisation.

As there is a progression with more standardization, perhaps queues, and simple web interfaces become built-in functions of a popular language, the less the developer has to think about the how and the more their job is focused on the what.



The more the developer is concerned with the what over the how, the more valuable industry-related knowledge becomes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An exploration in number systems

For most people, the denary system of numbers is perfectly natural. So much so that people don’t even give other options a second thought. The alternatives are not just hypothetical but are in their own way ingrained in our culture. What is the denary system of numbers? Denary from the Latin decem for ten, is a system of numbers where we have 10 symbols 0 to 9. For this, we use a positional number system based on powers of 10. Each column to the left has a value 10 times that to the right. The number 1000 is: Thousands Hundreds Tens units 1 0 0 0 This isn’t the only system that could be used and in fact, 10 is special only in the sense that we have 10 fingers. If the number of fingers isn’t taken into account then base 12 would make arithmetic a lot simpler. Instead of a 10s column you have a dozens, instead of 100s you have 144s. For this you ofcourse need more symbols. 10 is represented with the symbol A and 11 is represented with the symbol B. 12 is re
Read more

Structural engineering with cardboard

Image
Moving into a new flat I have ended up with a lot of cardboard and have actually struggled to get it to all be taken away. I then saw this Kickstarter on hacker news which introduced me to the idea that I could perhaps use the cardboard I had been throwing away the whole time. I have been toying with some ideas for building myself a robot, or at least a robot arm but they seem to be just ludicrously expensive and still not able to lift much weight. One of the problems with the advancement of robotics is that although processing power has come down in price at a rate that no other product ever has, the cost of actuators (The motion inducing components like motors) has remained largely the same. I want to explore an idea I have for using cheaper motors in a robotic arm in another post though. The problem I want to look at here is the possibility of being able to use cardboard, a material which can almost be considered to have a negative price, as the structure to the robot. I love the
Read more