Quotes About Engineering

When I am there at our global product development centers, I am meeting with the design team and reviewing design work being done there and meeting with engineers responsible for work being done specific to that region, meeting with purchasing team.

The team at VCU is renowned for being at the cutting edge of some of the world's most important, lifesaving medical and pharmaceutical engineering research.

A single Sherman tank took three hundred man-hours to waterproof, occupying the five-man crew for a week.

Also shipped to the Norman coast were ten miles of floating piers and pierheads, with telescoping legs to rise and subside with the tide. In all, two million tons of construction materials went into the Mulberries, including seventeen times more concrete than had been poured for Yankee Stadium in the 1920s.

You're not dealing with people," Jerry told him. "These are programmers, boy. Programmers!

On the way we talked about the road sign Bridge Ices Before Road. I always wondered, If that's a problem, why don't they just build the bridge out of the same stuff they use to build the road? Drema explained that the bridge isn't made out of different material than the road, but that the bridge ices quicker because it's alone, hanging there without the land under it to keep it warm.

It was at Bell Labs that I first made direct contact with real semiconductor experts and thus began to fully understand what amazing materials they were and what they could do.

if I must encode either the interface or the implementation, I choose the implementation. Calling it ShapeFactoryImp, or even the hideous CShapeFactory, is preferable to encoding the interface.

Factories are a complexity that can often be avoided, especially in the early phases of an evolving design.

Software has two types of value: the value of its behavior and the value of its structure. The second of these is the greater of the two because it is this value that makes software soft.

This is the philosophy of YAGNI: "You aren't going to need it." There is wisdom in this message, since over-engineering is often much worse than under-engineering. On the other hand, when you discover that you truly do need an architectural boundary where none exists, the costs and risks can be very high to add such a boundary.

Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change. —Grady Booch

Implementation Patterns.

If a component contains software that should be reused, it should not also contain software that is not designed for reuse. Either all the classes in a component are reusable, or none of them are.

THE STABLE ABSTRACTIONS PRINCIPLE A component should be as abstract as it is stable.

As an engineer, you have a depth of knowledge about your systems and projects that no managers can possibly have. With that knowledge comes the responsibility to act.

The architecture of a software system is the shape given to that system by those who build it. The form of that shape is in the division of that system into components, the arrangement of those components, and the ways in which those components communicate with each other.

software has two types of value: the value of its behavior and the value of its structure.

THE ACYCLIC DEPENDENCIES PRINCIPLE Allow no cycles in the component dependency graph.

THE STABLE DEPENDENCIES PRINCIPLE Depend in the direction of stability.

More precisely, the Law of Demeter says that a method f of a class C should only call the methods of these: • C • An object created by f • An object passed as an argument to f • An object held in an instance variable of C

When the I metric is 1, it means that no other component depends on this component (Ca = 0), and this component does depend on other components (Ce > 0). This is as instable as a component can get; it is irresponsible and dependent. Its lack of dependents gives it no reason not to change, and the components that it depends on may give it ample reason to change.

Master programmers think of systems as stories to be told rather than programs to be written.

The first concern of the architect is to make sure that the house is usable — not to ensure that the house is made of bricks.