A tale of bridges
A bit of open source magic happened today. Actually, it has been happening a while, the full story goes back decades. Or rather to the time when humans first started communicating with each other. But I digress (note to self, find a good way to link to post’s I haven’t written yet).
A few weeks ago I came across this blog posting Programming Sucks
The thesis of one section was that, All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people:
Imagine joining an engineering team. You’re excited and full of ideas, probably just out of school and a world of clean, beautiful designs, awe-inspiring in their aesthetic unity of purpose, economy, and strength. You start by meeting Mary, project leader for a bridge in a major metropolitan area. Mary introduces you to Fred, after you get through the fifteen security checks installed by Dave because Dave had his sweater stolen off his desk once and Never Again. Fred only works with wood, so you ask why he’s involved because this bridge is supposed to allow rush-hour traffic full of cars full of mortal humans to cross a 200-foot drop over rapids. Don’t worry, says Mary, Fred’s going to handle the walkways. What walkways? Well Fred made a good case for walkways and they’re going to add to the bridge’s appeal. Of course, they’ll have to be built without railings, because there’s a strict no railings rule enforced by Phil, who’s not an engineer. Nobody’s sure what Phil does, but it’s definitely full of synergy and has to do with upper management, whom none of the engineers want to deal with so they just let Phil do what he wants. Sara, meanwhile, has found several hemorrhaging-edge paving techniques, and worked them all into the bridge design, so you’ll have to build around each one as the bridge progresses, since each one means different underlying support and safety concerns. Tom and Harry have been working together for years, but have an ongoing feud over whether to use metric or imperial measurements, and it’s become a case of “whoever got to that part of the design first.” This has been such a headache for the people actually screwing things together, they’ve given up and just forced, hammered, or welded their way through the day with whatever parts were handy. Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody’s pretty sure they’re important parts. After the introductions are made, you are invited to come up with some new ideas, but you don’t have any because you’re a propulsion engineer and don’t know anything about bridges.
Would you drive across this bridge? No. If it somehow got built, everybody involved would be executed. Yet some version of this dynamic wrote every single program you have ever used, banking software, websites, and a ubiquitously used program that was supposed to protect information on the internet but didn’t.
Now, this sparked an idea in my mind and I had a friend, Leona, who likes to draw stuff. So I sent her the story about the bridge. As I wrote to Leona:
I am wanting to give a talk which will feature this bridge thing (read below) and was wondering if you would be able to draw that bridge for me?
Think Heath Robinson with maybe a touch of Salvador Dali.
At this point I am way beyond my artistic knowledge and out of my depth, but I keep going:
wooden sidewalks, no railings, suspension cables in weird places, crazy ceramic tiles everywhere (all different designs). Dave’s missing sweater holding up part of the bridge etc etc.
Not sure if this is the sort of thing you usually draw, but thought it might be something you could do.
I added:
Oh, and also if you want to read the whole bridge article it is here, on the aptly named stilldrinking.org
It explains why I am a little crazy (ok maybe only partly).
So we exchanged a few emails about the details of the picture, oh and I threw in wanting a picture of a perfect bridge as well, one you might actually want to walk across.
I said that I wanted to write a story here, on this blog, which is itself a bit of a work in progress, so I included a nerd aside for Leona:
(nerd aside: I need to do some nerd magic to turn that into a proper blog – I might even have that done later today – but remember this is software and it could end up like that bridge).
Well the blog still needs work, but at least it hasn’t got people depending on it to get them across a gorge.
Well today I got the pictures back from Leona. And that has led to a whole other part of the tale of bridges. Will try to write that soon.