Scott, I take your point. I'll think about that.

From my reading, Medium is filled with "how to" example stories and too few on the engineering and architectural principles behind good software.

That lack was what started me writing for Medium in the first place. I come from a long line of mechanical engineers (though I trained as a biologist) and was taught that the principles informed the implementation.

I got into software by accident, in 1972, and am totally self-taught. It was the family engineering culture and mindset that helped me succeed back at a time when programmers thought of themselves as artists, not engineers.

Your statement did resonate with me, though. When I was a kid, my father used to take the motor from our boat (a large 6-cylinder Gray Marine engine) home to our basement over the winter. He’d totally disassemble it and have the parts spread all over the room.

He’d check and clean every part and then reassemble the motor in the Spring to go back into the boat. The only documentation he had was a list of the proper clearances to be set or maintained.

When I asked him how he knew how it all went back together, he looked at me somewhat incredulously and said: “It can only go back together one way.” That certainly wasn’t obvious to me, but he was one of the engineers who helped to design the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1.

I guess that for me, once I have figured out how something should work, the coding part is easy. Perhaps, more people use writing the code to figure out how the thing should work. Food for thought …

-Dick-

https://medium.com/swlh/on-being-a-professional-software-engineer-54f162459fdc