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How To/Not Engineer

• Reminders about things I should be careful to avoid; anti-patterns to look out for.
• Even though it's constantly expected of senior-ish engineers to not code, don't forget to program regularly and stay grounded in terms of expectations and understand what's going on.
  • It's too easy to become disconnected from reality.
• Architecture Astronauts
  • https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/

    • Remember that the architecture people are solving problems that they think they can solve, not problems which are useful to solve

  • https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astronauts-take-over/

    • And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn’t stop him.

  • Carmack on the metaverse attracting astronauts
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo&t=883s

    • We could spend years and thousands of people possibly and wind up with things that didn't contribute all that much to the ways that people are actually using the devices and hardware today. So my biggest advice is that we need to concentrate on actual products rather than technology, architecture or initiatives

    • It's really hard for people to accept how rarely future proofing and and planning for broad generalizations of things turns out to deliver value.

    • A product can be clearly judged ... Architectures and Technologies, SDKs and Toolkits can always claim that nobody picked it up; the Applications didn't use it the Right Way. You have to be using the things to make value from it.

    • https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1453884618143191051
  • Bubbles don't crash -- Bertrand Meyer

— Kunal