engineering - West of the Mississippi

engineering

A collection of 8 posts

Safe Bad

The last several years of my career have been spent in specialized teams doing specialized things. In a purely technical sense, that's been delightful and I've really learned a lot. My work at Dropbox has me working in a split experience team and mentorship is part of my work responsibility

Pressure Suits and a Suitcase?

Pressure Suits and a Suitcase?

The X-15 is a fascinating project in NASA and aeronautic engineering history. Running from 1958 to 1968 this plane couldn't take off: it was dropped from under the wing of a modified B-52 bomber. You can see it below, the black craft under the far wing. A single occupant craft,

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Grigori Medvedev's "The Truth About Chernobyl"

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Grigori Medvedev's "The Truth About Chernobyl"

Let me tell you a joke. > Days after the Chernobyl plant melted down General Tarakanov, aware of the extreme importance of clearing the reactor roof of radioactive graphite ahead of the weather, began accepting offers of robots from other nations to do the job. The West Germans, very confident, delivered

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.'s "Thirteen: The Apollo Flight that Failed"

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.'s "Thirteen: The Apollo Flight that Failed"

In the first Peculiar Books Reviewed we discussed David A. Mindell's delightful book "Digital Apollo" and, in particular, took from the book this lesson: a technical system which puts the human component in a position of supremacy over the machine is more capable of achieving the aim of the system

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Francis Spufford's "Backroom Boys"

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Francis Spufford's "Backroom Boys"

What is the soul of software engineering as a discipline? That is, who is it that the software engineer can esteem? What characteristics are laudable and worthy of emulation? Physicists have their heroes: Niels Bohr, say, careful to the point of being paralyzed by indecision but brilliant nonetheless, or Richard

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Alain de Botton's "Status Anxiety"

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Alain de Botton's "Status Anxiety"

I went to a conference earlier this month where everyone was uniformly lovely and brilliant and interesting and everyone agreed that it was an excellent conference and damn near everyone felt like surely, soon, all the other uniformly lovely and brilliant and interesting people would realize that they, and they

Instrumentation Talks, To Date

Instrumentation Talks, To Date

I've spoken twice recently this year on the instrumentation of complex systems, at SF Bay Area Erlang Factory in February and at Portland, OR Write the Docs in May. The Erlang Factory talk is a bit more engineer focused while the Write the Docs talk is for a more general,

An Incomprehensive Bibliography

An Incomprehensive Bibliography

This is an incomprehensive bibliography for the books and articles that have influenced my thinking around Instrumentation by Default for complex systems. As this is an area of ongoing personal research this bibliography is necessarily a vague snapshot. Books The following texts are sorted--roughly--in order of importance: * Charles Perrow, "Normal