Being an engineer

Software doesn’t obey the laws of physics, so I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about software engineering as such. Still, software as pure code isn’t much use: it has to run on a technological infrastructure, the hardware. So at that moment, when a system gets deployed, the programmer, the software developer, gives way to the systems engineer.

When we worry about deployment problems, when we fight to bring latency down, when we face the fallacies of distributed computing, when we try to cheat the limits of Amdahl’s Law, or take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud, at that moment we are being pure engineers.

Don’t forget that a programmer is an artist, but also an engineer. Happy Engineering Day.