Updates on the Crossover Project
No Newsletter Next Week
I'll be teaching the Alloy workshop.
Speaking of workshops…
TLA+ Workshop
TLA+ Workshop for October 20-22, 10 AM - 6 PM CST. 24 hours of labs, group exercises, and training on writing high quality specs that find critical design bugs before you implement everything, not after. If you register before this Friday, you can get $1000 off with the promo code EARLYBIRDCROW!
Last time I ran this workshop, we spent the last day going through real-world examples suggested by students and found some really hairy bugs via designs. Like "this took us a week to debug in the real system" kinds of bugs. This is powerful stuff!
Updates on the Crossover Project
Aside from tweaking the alloy workshop a bit, my main project this month is wrapping up the first draft of the Crossover Project. I promised $1000 to a random subscriber if didn't finish the first draft by the end of this month, and I really don't want to lose that money. So I'm full steam ahead.
For those of you joining us late, the crossover project was a set of interviews I did to pin down the differences between "software engineering" and "'real' engineering". I was frustrated about how many people argued about this online without doing serious research into what "real" engineering looks like. To rectify this, I interviewed 17 people who had worked as both a software engineer and a "real" engineer professionally. I asked them if software counted as engineering, how work as a software engineer was similar to and different from their work as a trad engineer, and what lessons we should be teaching and learning from other fields. I gave a talk on this here. The gist of my results are:
- Yes, we are engineers
- No, we are not special
- There is a lot we can teach and learn from other fields.
I originally wanted to write one of those sweeping narrative essays that basically turn journalism into a thrilling story like you'd see in the Atlantic or something, but turns out that's really fucking hard! So instead I'm writing a drier summary that covers these three points along with quotes and quick anecdotes from the interviewees. Also, I'm splitting it into three separate posts for SEO reasons a better reading experience. Here's where I currently am:
- Intro, methodology, "are we engineers". 5000 words. Mostly done, just gotta replace a bunch of placeholders and write a bit more about the history of licensure.
- 2000 words. All the high-level points are there but not filled in. Needs a lot more quotes and anecdotes.
- "What we learn", conclusion. 1300 words. I've done most of the "what they can learn from us" and almost none of "what we can learn from them." I'm leaving the conclusion out of the first draft.
Overall, when done I expect this to crack 11k words. To be clear, when I say "done" I mean done with the first draft, which is going to be… terrible. Going to have a lot of editing notes, placeholders, leaps of logic, just boring prose. It's something I can review as a holistic thing and for other people to check out, see if they see any glaring holes in what I'm writing. I'm not a very good writer, but I'm a pretty good editor.
Protip: Don't sit on your interviews for over a year before writing them up. Every time I look at my notes I see things that I should have put in the first draft. Oh well, it'll go in the second one.
Overall I'm hoping (hoping) I can have the second draft done by the end of November. My tentative plan is to finish all three parts before I release the first bit, and then spread them out over three weeks. I'll also share samples with the newsletter maybe a week or two before each essay goes public. Stay tuned!
If you're reading this on the web, you can subscribe here. Updates are once a week. My main website is here.
My new book, Logic for Programmers, is now in early access! Get it here.