Is Software Engineering Still an Oxymoron?
summary
Argues that software must adopt real-engineering practices: use CAD–SIM–FAB workflows, build system models that can be simulated before fabrication, and embed safety principles like a software Hippocratic oath. Cites concrete failures and successes — a six‑hour Facebook outage from a config partition, Boeing 737 MAX autopilot crashes, and a working 3.5 million lines of C on the Mars Curiosity rover — to show when modeling, constraint solvers and autonomic checks exist systems work, and when cognitive biases and hubris rule they fail.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Intro
- 5:39How to make progress
- 13:22How *not* to make progress
- 21:0660 years ago
- 33:54CAD – SIM – FAB?
- 41:19Understanding "Us"
- 56:10The pledge of a real engineer
- 57:14Outro
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