AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
The design of design, Fred Brooks, 7/14
Fun fact: I read this in preparation for giving [a presentation on "Software Engineering 101"] to our highschool interns.
The highest achievement in this respect is language design. A language is an abstraction that is purely general – that is, very abstract, but in a way that makes it applicable to many different situations and uses.
Architect and design Theorist. Best known for his book A Pattern Language which introduced the idea of design patterns, later picked up on by the software field.
The Holy Grail of computing, at least the kind I care about, is the powerful abstraction. All programming or system design is about designing abstractions, more or less. People who work with computers develop a fine sense of what makes a good abstraction, and their best professional moments are when they come up with the right one for a particular design.
Of course today we have actual engineers rebuilding the human soul. These are the computer technologists who have invented and reinvented the media by which people communicate and interact with each other. To the extent our souls are social, bound up with one another, this must drastically affect not just how we talk with each other, but what we are. Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin, Slack and Tiktok, are the designers of our group consciousness these days.