Why We Build Simple Software
blog.pickcode.io
blog.pickcode.io
No, it isn't. It is extremely complicated, containing two different mechanisms for propulsions, complex mechanical linkages for those propulsion mechanisms and steering, a deep web of electrical components including large software projects, augmenting the driving characteristics and providing essential safety features and much, much more.
It was painstakingly designed by thousands of engineers, who tried to take everything into account and to present to you something which to you "feels right", although you have zero idea about why it does.
Calling such a thing simple is completely ridiculous. As if the thousands of engineers were just superfluous and you could design a car by slapping together some components and have it work flawlessly. This is a highly integrated system, where a change to any single one component can influence all other components in very strange ways. That it is reliable, is not because it is simple, it is reliable because someone else has dealt with that complexity for you and spent an enormous amount of effort to get it right.
To be honest the arrogance of software developers is astounding. Looking at an enormously complicated project, which had to take into account a vast array of requirements and had to deal with all the complexity of mechanical, electrical and software systems working together and then going "that is simple, we should do simple things like they do", because the engineers working on it managed to hide all of that from you, speaks of so much arrogance. Just open up the hood and look at it. Look at it.
The cart isn't trying to be a one man band with all sorts of bells and whistles. Its a car that turns on and goes forward, which is all you expect of a car.
This user experience is the result of all the hard work done by the thousands of engineers and others involved. You seem offended on their behalf, but what the article is doing is actually praising their success. It doesn't describe anything about the internals of the car or the work done to design it, only the final _feature set_.
IMO this is just marketing content. A company wants to distinguish itself by claiming to offer a small, high-quality and easy-to-understand feature set that matters to a certain customers, instead of trading more functionality on paper for less "simplicity".
It might be true that they've found the exact right balance for their market. Or maybe they have constraints that prevent them from developing a broader range of features in parallel and that this is just spin.
I think it's not really about cars, is all I'm saying. The car is just a throwaway metaphor, and not a really great one.
No car is simple and certainly not hybrid cars. Just consider the electronics: think 100+ ECUs communicating using dozens of different protocols over hundreds meters of wires, and millions of lines of code running on a diverse set of processors.
That car should have been in for at least 4 oil changes (maintenance) in that mileage -- more if not using synthetic oil.
Back in the day, we had these things called email clients. A good example was Eudora from Qualcomm (yes, the Snapdragon company). It was simple, straightforward, and handled sending, receiving, and managing emails with aplomb -- and nothing else.
Then Microsoft came along and combined email, contacts, and calendaring in one application -- Outlook. And ate the lunch of all the non-web-based email clients out there. To this day Outlook is pretty much table stakes for working in a corporate environment, especially since all corporate IT has to do is deploy Exchange to handle all three tasks from the server side. And Eudora is literally a museum piece; the software's source was made available as a historic artifact and the trademark rights were transferred to the Computer History Museum.
"Simplicity" in software is a red herring. You need to read your market and find out what your customers actually want, what will make life easier and more convenient for your actual users. Sometimes people actually want the car that grills hamburgers, the cellphone with a built-in camera, the email client that also does contacts and calendaring.
Then Superhuman made a tool to simply deal with email quickly and easily (using vim key bindings no less) and charges $30 a month for it. There’s still a market for simplicity if you look for it.
Life is complex (and often quite complicated). Most actual solutions that people need are solving complex problems. You can't really solve complex problems with simple software, you'll just end up building a complex (and often complicated) web of simple solutions.
Our job as software engineers is to prevent the software from getting complicated, managing the complexity such that it's able to morph as the users needs change over time.
To fit the article, adding a grill to a car would be complicating the car, not making it more complex.
Instead of the simple-complex spectrum, I think about the big problems are usually made up of smaller problem spectrum.
My general experience has been the problems people want me to solve are not the actual problems that they need to solve.
The problems that need to be solved have very simple solutions.
The purported solutions to the purported problems are usually a way to avoid doing the simple solutions because it is "inconvenient" to people who want the other solution.
Maybe I'm jaded. Maybe I've had a bad lot. But it's happened enough, and in enough disparate instances, for me to think this is just humanity being humanity.
edit to add a caveat -- this applies generally, i.e. to most people most of the time. i feel like i cast a bit of a wide net with how this comment has been phrased.
Simple is just a name we attach to domains of well understood, well managed complexity.
Thats a pretty big strawman? This 'simple' car took thousands of people and many millions or billions of direct r&d. It has many more features than what was listed and it is fundamentally a complex beast. Reliability =/= simplicity.
Whatever software product your trying to sell that was build by a team of a half-dozen and mostly used off the shelf components is not a good comparison for the complexity of a car.
I'm sorry, what?
Please don't do this, people. It ruins completely good engines and the poor guy who gets this car with high mileage will be the one with the grenade on his hands.
Now with the software part. Keeping the software as "human sized" as possible and the ones who build it on the hook for support ( cheap paid support, not the main source of income of the contract ) is 80% of the work in order to keep complications in check.
Either way time and reality will weed out the ones who as "fancy" and "advanced" they are, nobody will have the money or patience to deal with them. The only unfortunate thing about this is how long it takes to play out and the victims it makes along the way until it succumbs under its own expensive weight.
I am wondering if car has some sensors for this: oil level is low, engine starts overheating etc.
In over forty five years of driving I have never changed a wheel beside the road. I have had two punctures and one blowout in that time. The first two were close enough to home to just drive home slowly and then drive to the nearest tyre fitter for a replacement and the last happened at night on a narrow sloping country road where jacking up the car would have been impossible even if I had been willing to risk being run down on a road barely wide enough for two cars.
Believe it or not, the UK is not the entire world.
In the US, we have vast stretches of highway with nothing in sight. You can pretty easily find yourself many miles away from the nearest town and with no cell service to call for help. If you get a flat in the middle of the actual desert we have, you're absolutely fucked without a spare. Your options are to wait and hope someone else drives by to offer help or just start walking. Maybe you'll find a gas station before you run out of water. Even in the more densely developed areas of the country you can find yourself stranded a long way between towns. It's happened to me twice before and it's not at all an uncommon story.
they also include patch and inflate kit for such cases?..
:-)
So how often do you find yourself in the middle of the desert? My experience of visiting the US is that the ordinary driver in the US doesn't venture out of the cities any more often than people in other parts of the world.