Engineering definition: elegant

Elegant (adj.): “I’m being an unnecessarily clever d!ck about this, and that’s going to open up a lorry-sized hole in my design that I won’t see because I’m being too smug about how clever this solution is. Oh, and it’ll be harder to fix, understand, build, troubleshoot, and use, but I saved $.000001 on each unit by committing untold future resources to solving the problems I don’t know I just made. It also took far longer to design than it would have had I done it in a more conventional manner, but that’s okay, because design time is free and per-unit cost is king.”

KISS is the alternative to "elegant", and frequently results in designs which are MORE elegant than trying to be clever produces.

Comments

  1. ColinJanuary 27, 2011 at 2:39 PM

    "When in doubt, use brute force."
    --Ken Thompson

    I read that quote very early in my programming career. It has served me well.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

18 Essential Skills for a Maker

@AntonOlsen recently posted an article on GeekDad enumerating 100 Essential Skills for Geeks. As he was inspired to do so by a list of "Essential Skills for Men", so I am inspired to make this list of essential skills for Makers. His list was a little long (100 items), terse (essentially one line per item, but with links), and slightly biased (heavier on computers than I might have liked, but to be fair, that is the most common geek fetish). I'm going to go for a shorter list, with slightly more verbose entries, and try to cast a wider net. If I get interest from this list, I'll follow up with an article on each point going into more detail. 1. Calculate power consumption and estimate battery life - Most electrical projects will involve batteries of some sort. Having an idea of how long your project will run on a battery can save you a lot of trouble later- that wireless garden soil moisture monitor is probably not going to run very long on a 9V battery. Mayb...
Read more

Breadboarding the Arduino- part 1

A few weeks ago, I purchased 10 Atmega328P's from Mouser , naively thinking it would be easy enough to get them working on a breadboard as an Arduino sans the fancy (expensive) board. I was planning to use an FTDI USB to TTL serial data cable to bootload (I bought a 5V one, then realized that the two 3.3V ones I already had would work fine- lesson one of this saga). I also bought a some 16MHz crystals and the appropriate capacitors. At this point, I want to extend my thanks to whomever it was that decided a 6-pin AVRISP compatible ICSP header would be a value-add to the Arduino. I know that 95% of the Arduino users out there will NEVER use it, but I am very grateful. So, first hurdle- I figure I'll take one of the 328s and upgrade my Arduino (it was one of the, what, six? Duemilanove's that shipped with a 168 from the factory). Supposedly, the Arduino IDE has the capability of loading the bootloader onto a blank chip through an AVRISP, but I'll be buggered if I co...
Read more

In Which I Create A Kerfuffle

Image
Caveat lector--this post has nothing  to do with making anything. Except the aforementioned kerfuffle. First things first--I am absolutely aware of my privilege. I'm a cis, hetero white man, of unexceptional girth and slightly more than average height. I have no scars, no birthmarks, no differences of ability which would draw the eye. In short, I'm playing the Game of Life on the lowest possible difficulty level, and damn lucky for it. So. A few months ago (right before Hogswatch  Christmas), I decided to start painting my fingernails. I've always wanted to--or, at least, since I was at least a preteen--but I've never had the courage to do it. I'm not prone to an action such as this simply for attention or to be "different". I simply realized that, for the first time in my life, I was comfortable enough with myself and my life to scratch a long-denied itch. My beautiful wife bought me many varieties of polish, and I've been painting my...
Read more