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I found this video in my recommended video feed on YouTube and I actually clicked it and was quite impressed and entertained. I have watched a few more videos by Practical Engineering channel and all were great.
As I was watching this, I could not help but draw various comparisons between Civil/Infrastructure Engineering and software engineering and program/system design and testing. Granted, most of our applications and systems to do not impact people's lives in a "life and death" situation, but crap happens when we don't plan well enough, or test well enough, and even then, with the best planning, bad things will still happen.
What Really Happened at the Oroville Dam Spillway? - YouTube[^]
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He makes great quality videos.
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Slacker007 wrote: I could not help but draw various comparisons between Civil/Infrastructure Engineering and software engineering and program/system design and testing.
Yes, indeed! "Periodic design reviews over the lifetime of the project"? "600 pages postmortem reports"? I've never seen that in our field where some people still resist informal code reviews and hate unit testing. It's true that civil engineering has had more time to develop these methods from the roman aqueducts to the Oroville Dam, but it is still sobering to see how true engineers solve serious problems.
Maybe we should just stop calling what we do "software engineering" and call it for what it is: just hacking.
Mircea
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True. But I also like to point out what would happen if a client asked that a bridge be lengthened by 20m during its next release.
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Greg Utas wrote: if a client asked that a bridge be lengthened by 20m during its next release
A civil engineer would simply answer "no" (or "hell no" or other more uncivil phrases). Both customer and engineer would learn to better respect each other for the next project.
Mircea
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Slacker007 wrote: most of our applications and systems to do not impact people's lives in a "life and death" situation
Boeing 737MAX anyone?
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..and the Airbus A320 autopilot[^].
"When you are dead, you won't even know that you are dead. It's a pain only felt by others; same thing when you are stupid."
Ignorant - An individual without knowledge, but is willing to learn.
Stupid - An individual without knowledge and is incapable of learning.
Idiot - An individual without knowledge and allows social media to do the thinking for them.
modified 19-Nov-21 21:01pm.
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Interesting thanks for the link
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Responsibility for human safety is a scary thing. In the mid-1980's I worked for a defense contractor. Our main project was building an emulation of the flight control system to be used in an experimental version of the F-16. The purpose of the emulation was to validate the design of the actual flight control system. I'll always remember something our aerospace engineer told us during one of our status reviews:
"This program is of vital importance to the safety of the pilot. The flight controls can operate the plane in an unstable state for performance. If those flight controls fail, the pilot dies 2-3 seconds later."
I could screw up a few lines of code, we would fail to find a design flaw, and someone could die. Scared the piss out of me, and was a factor in my decision to get out of defense work.
Software Zen: delete this;
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As Greg and I have been discussing Ximenes
Investigates a Ximenes cryptic (8)
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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EXAMINES?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Welcome back YAUT 
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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You need to make it a bit harder so that it might still be around when I get out of bed. 
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Yes how many hours difference are you ?
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Usually 5 hours behind you (Eastern timezone).
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Okay, first of all, I'm super proud of this:
An Andy Warhol rendering of a .22 pistol in original form, and on a three color e-paper display[^]
This is using nearest color matching to convert 24-bit color jpeg (Y'CbCr) to a 3-color device (indexed pixel format - 0:black/1:red/2:white)
I don't have an 8-color display yet, but when I get one and add dithering support to GFX it's going to be fun to load photos into it.
Anyway, the work that went into this, and the thought behind it is why I'm proud of it. It makes a super complicated thing simple - so simple that it's hard to appreciate it unless you had to make it.  I think most of the people that have seen it in the ESP32 forum I haunt don't understand why it's a big deal for color e-ink support.
On the other hand, my graphics library overall has garnered more interest than I ever anticipated so I can't complain.
Real programmers use butterflies
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This looks very impressive!
Can you make the color on my new BOOX Nova3 Color color e-ink reader more saturated per chance?!
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Wire it to a car battery.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Very impressive but MY OCDness wants to know why is it upside down? The label on the ePaper thing is upside down.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
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It's the way they mounted it on the board. The actual e-paper display I believe is right side up. It's bloody hard to tell though because I can't find a datasheet for the device.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I experience that a lot. A week of coding, and a 60 second demo of the result. Rarely is there an appreciation of the effort that went into it, simply because the user sees exactly what they wanted working smoothly and simply but they don't have the context to understand the effort that went into achieving that result.
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My bread and butter client is an engineer himself so he's easy to work with in that regard. I appreciate him.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Ah yes, I know that feeling well. I liken myself to Michaelangelo when the Pope told him "But I wanted the ceiling painted blue."
Software Zen: delete this;
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What forum do you use ?
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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www.reddit.com/r/esp32
I'm not a reddit fan typically but they have an espressif developer who mods that subreddit and he's super helpful and the community is mostly friendly
Real programmers use butterflies
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