engineering_as_an_art_form

Engineering As An Art Form

I cannot find the lines dividing engineering, art, truth, spirituality, beauty, love, and life. I see the world as heterogeneous but as a whole, as having phases as different as that of gas, liquid, and solid, but like H2O, still being of the same. Separating art from engineering does not improve the engineer, rather it lessens her by removing a possible point of reference. Separating spirituality from truth strengthens neither the pilgrim nor the philosopher, it only takes from them a means of understanding one another.

Engineering As Philosophy
Each tree is completely unique while being perfectly matched to its surroundings and requiring no maintenance. Improvement comes gradually and as required due to constant change and growth.(cont.)

Best Practices
Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. (cont.)

What Management Does
All too often you will find that the "indispensable" individuals in an organization, whose valiant efforts and overtime are required almost daily to keep the business going, are in fact the genesis of the poorly designed systems on which they are now seen as "heroes" due to their "diligence", "hard work", and "business knowledge". (cont.)

Standards vs. Tests
Unit tests are a contract between both the engineer or business and the developer, and between the developer and operations. (cont.)

What Management Should Do
A manager should provided direction and focus, the resources necessary to meet objectives, and should remove obstacles to meeting those objectives. (cont.)

Beauty In Engineering
Sound engineering and good design practices result inevitably in the unmistakable mark of beauty. (cont.)

An Understanding Of Ourselves
We all have in our genetic sequences the ability to recognize truth and to separate it from lies, and to recognize beauty and separate it from ugliness, garishness, pornography, and cheap mimicry. (cont.)

My Engineering Philosophy
If I have no objectives, then I will never meet them, and if I have no principles, it will not matter if I do. (cont.)

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copyright Katherine Elizabeth Lightsey 1959-2013 (aka; my life)

"Art is the proper task of life." - Friedrich Nietzsche

[Charles Martin]

I love the philosophy behind your development practices and we would all be better served by incorporating the same philosophies in our own work. Unfortunately, for many, laziness, or doing the bare minimum, guide their overall development practices. While they chalk it up as simplicity, as you describe within chaos theory, that initial step is what then leads to one of many outcomes and, because it was too simplistic, the future development becomes more chaotic and patchwork.

Many will read this and just roll their eyes because they have no such philosophy, usually due to cynicism or outright hatred towards their employers,and feel that there is no need to go through such work to create beauty for, as they would call them, pigs. This cynicism carries them through every job/employer and they never create beauty, because they have such a low bar for what they define as pigs.

Every day we have an opportunity to create beauty (much like the old saying “You can choose to be happy this day”). We really need to find ways to eliminate the cynicism, in ourselves and others, so that the possibility of creating beauty is more realistic and rewarding.

[Katherine E. Lightsey]

Thank you so much for your comments Charles! I simply KNEW that you were in great part a kindred spirit! Your observation that doing the least work possible is often mistaken for simplicity is evidence of the clarity of thought I always find in our conversations and for which I hold you in the highest regard.
I wish you peace, truth, beauty, and wisdom in your own life.
Katherine