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

THREE.js: minecraft in a weekend

Image
I have been enjoying exploring the ideas behind procedural worlds and in a previous post even showed a simple voxel renderer based in THREE.js which would load chunks when the camera got close enough to the edge. That was based on the great tutorial here which explains how to create a voxel-based mesh in THREE.js such that it doesn’t use all of the machine’s resources for the smallest of worlds. I found that to be an invaluable source of information and continually referenced back to that throughout the weekend. Looking back at my git logs for this project to be able to type this up, I have no intention of this post being a tutorial in itself, my progress was as follows: Walking around rather than observer view Sideways collision detection - not walking through the map Changing to a system where there was a sensible grass - sand - water height system Adding trees Another optimisation for terrain generation in addition to the afor...
Read more

Picking apart Perlin noise from first Principles

Image
Although there are a lot of tutorials explaining the what and even the how of Perlin noise and the general class of algorithms; gradient noise, I have found none explaining the why behind the algorithm. Why does this algorithm work? In this post I aim to build up perlin noise from first principles, explaining why we add each element to the algorithm as we do. We will start by trying to make a surface, perhaps for a computer game world map. We are aiming for something that looks like a mountainous region. We don’t want to hand craft this landscape as we want it to go on forever, how can we procedurally generate this world? Given we want the surface to be random, we could start with that. However as you can see that doesn’t lead to the most pleasing of surfaces, in fact it wouldn’t be traversable in the game. Our problem is that there is no smoothness from one place to another. The lowest of points could be adjacent to the highest of points. What we want is for it to take som...
Read more

The invincible 20 year olds

Image
It is often said that people age 20 think of themselves as if they’re invincible. It’s an attribute most commonly given to young men in general.  The idea of immortality is one which comes up in mythology a lot and sometimes it comes up within scientific circles. Bacon spent his life in search of finding ways to become immortal until, in perhaps an ironic way, his search killed him. When immortality is spoken about the concept of ageing is often also brought up, Tithonus comes to mind. Solving the problem of ageing through does not lead to immortality, although it may seem to be that way. Each year you live your chance of dying that year increases. This is how the ageing process manifests itself in this side of the numbers, growing from a low of 0.01% age 5 up to almost 40% age 100. What if instead, this didn’t rise. What if every year you had the same chance of dying as wh...
Read more