The qualities you will always find in great software engineers, http://threevirtues.com/. However you should be very careful around hubris…
Posts Tagged ‘Basics’
Laziness, Impatience and Hubris
Posted by Dan G on November 29, 2011
Posted in Other | Tagged: Basics | Leave a Comment »
A child of five…
Posted by Dan G on November 22, 2011
“A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”
Groucho Marx
Some of the rules about computers and systems are so fundamental that a child of five (in this case, rather fortuitously, Loki) can understand it and extrapolate extra rules (or scenarios).
Starting from two statements:
- A computer can only do what it’s told to do, by humans
- Computers don’t make mistakes, humans do
He was very quickly able to reach these conclusions:
- A computer can’t do what it’s not been told to do
- If a computer makes a mistake, it’s because a human made a mistake
He doesn’t quite understand the nuance of how many humans could have made the mistake (he only considers the user at the moment, not the pile of software engineers / QA / project managers / etc hidden behind the curtains), but the seed is there.
Pedants may now bang on about hardware failure 
Posted in Family | Tagged: Basics, Loki | Leave a Comment »
