Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design [pdf]

(ece.uvic.ca)

73 points | by tosh 3 hours ago

7 comments

  • barishnamazov 14 minutes ago
    Law 20 seems to express the state of most startups these days:

    > "A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."

  • wcrossbow 29 minutes ago
    The last and most important slide is missing.

    "Ignore all the advise above and do the right thing Subtext: This will take multiple lifetimes to accomplish"

    This is particularly important considering that some of the advice is at odds with each other and engineering is an unending juggling of tradeoffs. It's also by far the hardest to achieve both technically and socially but worth striving for.

  • Sharlin 1 hour ago
    The first law already gives a good reason why software "engineering" is rarely actually engineering.
    • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10 minutes ago
      Oh god it can be worse when the suits try to measure everything. Some things are measurable and others are taste / gut and that is OK.
    • PxldLtd 1 hour ago
      Almost all the laws are great guidance for Software dev to be honest and idiomatic to a lot of what's banded around today as good practice.
  • joha4270 1 hour ago
    While this PDF might be new, Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design dates back to 2003.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20031101212246/https://spacecraf...

  • jobjobjobjob 25 minutes ago
    > Bhargava’s Law: Only 1 out of 10 research ideas make it into industrial practice

    It's a nice reflection, but what is the origin of this? Can't find another reference to this "law" online.

  • z3t4 1 hour ago
    I like systems that are maintence free and easily replaceable. My experience so far in software engineering is that technologies die, so it should also be easy to replace the tecnology, like the hardware it runs on, the platform/os, the programming language and the framework.
  • num42 1 hour ago
    TL;DR:

    Minimize negative(painful) notions as much as possible, ideally approaching zero, while maximizing positive (pleasurable) notions.

    Minimize negative(painful) notions: Uncertainty, Risk, Chaotic behavior, Randomness, Non-deterministic, Instability, Cost, Energy losses, Time consumption, Resource usage, Excessive complexity, Failure modes, Noise

    Maximize positive(Pleasure) notions: Reliability, Efficiency, Deterministic, Predictability, Precision, Accuracy, Verification, Validation, Safety, Stability, Simplicity (lower complexity), Robustness, Redundancy

    • xtiansimon 33 minutes ago
      I can think of a few SaaS products in the document scanning and OCR space whose UIs are not efficient or simple, while being time consuming and, to my mind, chaotic.

      There should be an Akin Exit Clause from said 3-year contracts. They have zero incentives to fix or improve _anything_ during those years of servitude.