The Disruptive Frequency Blog

Philosophical musings and observations on our seemingly motionless yet whizzing planet.


Enginners and Technicians

There are a lot of technicians posing as engineers. The mindset of an engineer versus that of a technician is quite different. An engineer works in a manner irrespective of the tools. Whereas for the technician, its all about the tools. When it comes to software, an engineer is concerned about principles and heursistics to serve as a guide for a design. Whereas a technician starts from the tool, or framework and works on a design. I see a lot of this in the industry. The tools take such a dominant role in the design that the software itself has the name of the tools in the libraries and functions making it up. Building software with a technician mindset makes for brittle, hard-to-maintain, and hard-to-understand systems.

A Tesla engineer designing a Tesla automobile doesn't get excited about a new arc welder and allows for that to influence his design. He is concerned with the aesthetics, the aerodynamics, the function, how all the components are assembled together, etc. Technicians posing as engineers is pretty pervasive in the industry. They don't allow for higher level design discussion to happen because they have tunnel vision and think whatever latest tool they have got their hands on is all they need to design a system.

Programming Outside

Setup the computer outside and worked on incorporating Bootstrap into website. Not exactly working outside on a ranch, but working outside nevertheless.


I find that I can focus for longer periods of time out in the fresh air, which allows me to think deeper about things I am working on. A natural setting still has sounds but they are less jarring than city sounds.


Azure DocumentDB

Created a NoSQL database in Microsoft Azure, called DocumentDB. Thinking of the speed at which one can develop with a schema-less database is pretty cool. Actually, it's not a "schema-less" database, contrary to popular ways of describing it. The schema is defined in the JSON data structures. So not exactly "schema-less". More of a "dynamically typed schema". I can think of many way in which I can use this. I have to think of the ways in which I can't as well.