Hillel Wayne

So, it's hard to tell how much of like the loss of the past few years was AI versus the end of like zero interest rate policy and like the post-COVID crash. And I think it's more the latter, but like again, LLMs are still getting better.

And I wonder sometimes if that is the reason people don't recognize the use of math in software engineering is because the math they do need is not the math they've been exposed to.

But I think it is more useful for most developers to have an exposure to like what math has in the various fields versus just going all in every single field when they see them, right? You've got to know what's available to know what's most useful for you. And most math will not be useful for you.

but I can tell you with first hand experience nuclear power plants do not care about this stuff. They're actually just fine with with with thorough testing.

I think this project and writing about it and thinking about it has firmly moved me from the camp of we are definitely not to we probably are.

And that kind of compiling of information about the materials is something other fields do that we don't do. An analogy that I would think of in software would be something like a 500-page book on how to version an API.

while we are a lot better at iterating than other fields, we're worse at the planning part. Like we still need to do some kind of planning before we iterate and we just aren't as good as those other fields.

Software is kind of unique in having the third kind of the practitioner conference where we are just meeting to get better at what we do. We also are really the only kind to really focus heavily on like open source in making our knowledge freely available.

And the first thing he pointed out to me was that they had their Agile revolution in 1960.

If I had to summarize what I found in general, I'd put it like this. Everybody hates waterfall.