Beauty in Engineering

In terms of beauty in engineering, do you know what I find to be beautiful?

Well, here's one thing: it's coming up with a plan to secure a particular network protocol, documenting the plan, and then implementing the plan in code that executes in several radically different environments.

It is (perversely?) pleasurable to see seemingly random bytes be transmitted onto a wire from one peer on the network destined to another very different peer on the network and to have all of these bytes be decoded and authenticated properly. The mathematics behind this stuff is extremely pretty, and making it all work in the Real World is fascinating.

The icing on the cake is knowing that all of the code is efficient and scalable, and that the code has a reasonable test harness so that there are no hidden surprises.

As a character on a TV show once said, I love it when a plan comes together.

All I need is a programmer

This excellent blog posting reminds me of the time that one of the executives at $DAYJOB referred to programmers as "monkeys". It was clear to me at the time that he was simultaneously trying to express that we were all interchangeable and somehow he was trying to motivate us too.

His comment was actually wonderfully honest; in ten seconds I learned exactly what he thought of us and our work.