Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design [pdf]

(ece.uvic.ca)

52 points | by tosh 2 hours ago

4 comments

  • Sharlin 52 minutes ago
    The first law already gives a good reason why software "engineering" is rarely actually engineering.
    • PxldLtd 47 minutes ago
      Almost all the laws are great guidance for Software dev to be honest and idiomatic to a lot of what's banded around today as good practice.
  • joha4270 1 hour ago
    While this PDF might be new, Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design dates back to 2003.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20031101212246/https://spacecraf...

  • z3t4 34 minutes ago
    I like systems that are maintence free and easily replaceable. My experience so far in software engineering is that technologies die, so it should also be easy to replace the tecnology, like the hardware it runs on, the platform/os, the programming language and the framework.
  • num42 31 minutes ago
    TL;DR:

    Minimize negative(painful) notions as much as possible, ideally approaching zero, while maximizing positive (pleasurable) notions.

    Minimize negative(painful) notions: Uncertainty, Risk, Chaotic behavior, Randomness, Non-deterministic, Instability, Cost, Energy losses, Time consumption, Resource usage, Excessive complexity, Failure modes

    Maximize positive(Pleasure) notions: Reliability, Efficiency, Deterministic, Predictability, Precision, Accuracy, Verification, Validation, Safety, Stability, Simplicity (lower complexity), Robustness, Redundancy

    • xtiansimon 1 minute ago
      I can think of a few SaaS products in the document scanning and OCR space whose UIs are not efficient or simple, while being time consuming and, to my mind, chaotic.

      There should be an Akin Exit Clause from said 3-year contracts. They have zero incentives to fix or improve _anything_ during those years of servitude.