Comment by bitexploder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitexploder | Hacker News Reader

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This is a good insight. Having read about NASA's culture some from books like "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth", they tend to be very dedicated to documenting everything. Every last little detail goes into handbooks or manuals about how they fixed problems or things that could have gotten someone killed, adapting procedures to take into account even the smallest of practical details. These engineers come from a different era. You can see all the printed binders on their desks. I think in many ways the process of documentation for space missions is more expensive, pain staking, and solid than modern practices. I think also they do have the advantage of all working in the same place. You just go to Tom, the human search engine/librarian, and ask him what he knows about thing X. (The article mentioned Tom was the self styled "librarian" of the project). Most organizations need a "Tom" of their own and are poorer for not having one.

Our company is building a remote team, and similar to Gitlab, we are discovering that staying in sync is not just a good value but a way of life. Trello, wiki, and code help us repeat our assessment work and ensure everyone is on the same page.

To give some kind of context on more "modern" methods, we use stupendous numbers of PDFs, DOORS for requirements traceability and tons of code commenting. At last count our project had 0.73 commenting lines per line of code (and we use Allman style bracketing).

We are also putting non mission-critical information in a Wiki; basically as a tl;dr of the more dense documentation.

Oh man, I hated DOORS so much. POS software. I dont doubt its useful, but using it was the bane of my existance

Heh, DOORS is pretty crappy. But once you get used to its flavour of crappiness, you can get shit done.

I think it's one of those tools which demand a lot of expertise in setting them up, or you will paint yourself in a corner, with explosive paint.

Everything you described is just standard engineering practice. I've always found it funny how software developers call themselves "engineers" while working nothing like them.

Everything you described is just standard engineering practice. I've always found it funny how software developers call themselves "engineers" while working nothing like them.

So true. But when you have a culture and an industry where 2 years ia a long tenure at a company and a long lifecycle for the latest faddish "framework" or whatever, it's impossible. I'd love to stay somewhere 10+ years and work on a single significant application the whole time. But it seems to be impossible to find such a gig. Experience is generally undervalued throughout our entire industry.

"I'd love to stay somewhere 10+ years and work on a single significant application the whole time. "

Try CAD. The industry is full of crusty applications pushing 30 years. I'm sure some of the careers are equally long.

You can do that at any time. Start a project and work on it forever. I'm still working on a compiler I started in 1982.

It would be standard practice in a waterfall development methodology which big corporations still use to this day.

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