Today I'm going to yell about appliance-grade engineering.

parenTessaLation

parenTessaLation

This rant is as much a case study of the recent #Voyager1 mission news (https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/10/28/after-pause-nasas-voyager-1-communicating-with-mission-team/) as it is a response to the utterly on-point stuff that @ludicity said yesterday in their blogpost:

Why I Will Always Be Angry About Software Engineering — Ludicity

(ludic.mataroa.blog)

parenTessaLation

Fifty years is a long time for software.

Fifty years is not very long for a set of tooling.

I'm not going to rant at length about tooling today, even though it's very connected to the points I'm trying to make here.

parenTessaLation

What I will say on the topic of tooling is that I learned to do woodworking, metalcraft, and a bunch of other artisan skills using tools that were over a century old, and they're still as usable today as they were 25 years ago when I was learning the difference between messing around to learn and crafting something carefully.

You can't say that for anything related to computers, so I'm not going to address that today.

parenTessaLation

So, when I say fifty years isn't a long time for tools, I'm saying that everything since code was run on the first microprocessor barely counts as a tool in my book, they just aren't stable enough yet.

Which brings us to my main point.

Appliances, specifically appliance grade computing.

parenTessaLation

A bit of history.

On September 5, 1977,
the Voyager 1 hardware
was yeeted towards interstellar space.

Four years later, in 1981, the backup S-band portion of the communications hardware was shut off.

In October of 2024, after a partial degradation of the primary X-band communications interface, the backup S-band communications automatically came back online due to the fault, after a period of 43 years offline.

THAT is appliance-grade engineering.