Status Update: Bridge On The Balcony Kwai

As you can see, there has been no actual progress on the bridge project. I think the lesson here is that one of the defining differences between software engineers and real engineers is that the software variety are incredibly lazy.

I'm not much on production, although sometimes I relish it. What I do enjoy is coming up with a thousand random ideas, waiting on my ass, and then sending everyone links when some random thing I thought of years ago comes to fruition through someone else's work. See: The Pizza Vending Machine. No, I didn't think of this specifically, but I've always told people about my idea for a fresh pasta vending machine. This vending machine took 6 million dollars and 3 years of R&D to bring to market. Sometimes letting someone else do it is the best idea.

Is A Software Engineer An Engineer?

I was just filling out an introspective questionnaire in preparation for some team building thing at work and I got to thinking, am I really an engineer? Does being a software engineer endow me with the skills to do any engineering task, given enough time and research material?

To try to answer these questions, I am going to start a pet project to test my engineering potential. I am going to build a bridge from one end of my balcony to the other. It's about 4ft across and I don't even know enough about this subject to say what the tolerance for load should be. I still think it's an interesting challenge because it's so different from anything I've ever had to do (except maybe with popsicle sticks in middle school).

Perhaps this is the beginning of a series of challenges, to be followed in the future by "Is a software engineer a doctor?" and "Is a software engineer a mechanic?" and so on... Can the methods and approaches of analysis and deconstruction lead to (at least moderate) success in any field?

Would anyone from other fields care to try the same experiment? Wouldn't it be nice if we could all do anything?