The Best Place to Build a Subway:
Building projects despite (and because of) existing complex systems
Many engineering projects are big and complex. They require integrating into the existing environment to tie into stuff that precedes the new, big, complex thing. It is common to bemoan the challenges of dealing with the preexisting stuff. Many times, engineers don’t realize that their projects (and their paychecks) exist only because of the preexisting and complex systems that impose constraints on the new work. This column looks at some sophisticated urban redevelopment projects that are very much part of daily life in San Francisco and compares them with the challenges inherent in building software.
Communicate Using the Numbers 1, 2, 3, and More:
Leveraging expectations for better communication
People often use lists of various sizes when communicating. I might have 2 reasons for supporting the new company strategy. I might tell you my 3 favorite programming languages. I might make a presentation that describes 4 new features. There is 1 vegetable that I like more than any other. The length of the list affects how the audience interprets what is being said. Not aligning with what the human brain expects is like swimming upstream. Given the choice, why would anyone do that?
Demystifying Stablecoins:
Cryptography meets monetary policy
Self-sovereign stablecoins are interesting and probably here to stay; however, they face numerous regulatory hurdles from banking, financial tracking, and securities laws. For stablecoins backed by a governmental currency, the ultimate expression would be a CBDC. Since paper currency has been in steady decline (and disproportionately for legitimate transactions), a CBDC could reintroduce cash with technological advantages and efficient settlement while minimizing user fees.
Chipping Away at Moore’s Law:
Modern CPUs are just chiplets connected together.
Smaller transistors can do more calculations without overheating, which makes them more power efficient. It also allows for smaller die sizes, which reduce costs and can increase density, allowing more cores per chip. The silicon wafers that chips are made of vary in purity, and none are perfect, which means every chip has a chance of having imperfections that differ in effect. Manufacturers can limit the effect of imperfections by using chiplets.
How Do Committees Invent? and Ironies of Automation:
The formulation of Conway’s law and the counterintuitive consequences of increasing levels of automation
The Lindy effect tells us that if a paper has been highly relevant for a long time, it’s likely to continue being so for a long time to come as well. My first choice is "How Do Committees Invent?" Author Melvin E. Conway provides a lot of great material that led up to the formulation of the law that bears his name. My second choice is Lisanne Bainbridge’s "Ironies of Automation." It’s a classic treatise on the counterintuitive consequences of increasing levels of automation.
Kode Vicious Plays in Traffic:
With increasing complexity comes increasing risk.
There is no single answer to the question of how to apply software to systems that can, literally, kill us, but there are models to follow that may help ameliorate the risk. The risks involved in these systems come from three major areas: marketing, accounting, and management. It is not that it is impossible to engineer such systems safely, but the history of automated systems shows us that it is difficult to do so cheaply and quickly. The old adage, "Fast, cheap, or correct, choose two," really should be "Choose correct, and forget about fast or cheap." But the third leg of the stool here, management, never goes for that.
To Catch a Failure: The Record-and-Replay Approach to Debugging:
A discussion with Robert O’Callahan, Kyle Huey, Devon O’Dell, and Terry Coatta
When work began at Mozilla on the record-and-replay debugging tool called rr, the goal was to produce a practical, cost-effective, resource-efficient means for capturing low-frequency nondeterministic test failures in the Firefox browser. Much of the engineering effort that followed was invested in making sure the tool could actually deliver on this promise with a minimum of overhead. What was not anticipated, though, was that rr would come to be widely used outside of Mozilla?and not just for sleuthing out elusive failures, but also for regular debugging.