Typing Wishes into a Box

These meditations are written after reading Redis' creator Antirez last blog post "Control the ideas, not the code".

Things are changing fast, and if some time ago the idea was nothing and the entire bottleneck resided in the practical execution, this isn't true at all anymore. Uniqueness is the leverage. But with it stand of course things like the ability to sell it, to reach the target, and to design it in a way that gives it a proper soul. The process of creating something, especially software, has become much more about telling wishes into a box rather than crafting it with your own hands. Of course you want to express your actual desire as well as possible, or you will end up like Bear in "Obsession", killed by a badly expressed wish.

It has always been like this: the owner of the idea doesn't necessarily have to be the one who actually handcrafts it. Think about Gustave Eiffel: he didn't draw every part of the tower, but he could hand the work away precisely because he knew what he was handing away, so delegating can be defined as inexpensive only for the person who could have done it himself.

In fact, the caveat is precisely that: everybody can generate an idea and express it, but how many know the pillars behind it so that they can create a new way of executing it?

As an engineer I can't blame Antirez for saying that this new way of looking at engineering is actually very painful, and sad, for some engineers, probably due to the fact that one of the many existential pleasures of engineering has always been the struggle and complexity of solving hard problems, more than the solution itself.

Maybe this situation is only forcing us to see the harsh-to-grasp truth that engineering is more about thinking than executing, but for now that isn't completely true since manufacturing and handcrafting are engineering too and still need to be executed manually (most of the time) by humans.

So is it becoming the purpose of an engineer to link what isn't built yet, what is solvable, to the solving machine and ensure that this is done and works properly? If this is true, whoever has an idea just has to take it, give it to a machine, and ensure that everything is okay — pretty discouraging for a species that has always been the most intelligent on the planet.

So, a final matter arises in my mind, and it is about how the next generations will learn how to plan and architect systems, and design projects having skipped the basics? A different way of abstraction will need to be taught.