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Comment by davidthewatson | Hacker News Reader

This has won countless races for just about every top F1 driver you can name for decades, prolly WRC too. That old analog world transfers nicely to digital in video gaming. Sadly, it's not more widely accepted in software development though software design and software deployment seem to have caught on.

As an old C++ hacker, I'm waiting for the day when modern C++ shops read Accelerated C++ from Koenig and Moo circa two decades ago. Then, I could rejoice in someone anywhere writing C++ code that more closely resembled the python-esque C++ masquerading as pseudo-code in that book.

More sadly, I just keep seeing people emulate bit-twiddling from yesteryear when the compiler likely optimizes a fair bit of this.

The cyclomatic complexity scores in the paper look off by an order-of-magnitude but they may be better than the laugh riot I've measured in the last few years and my math may be failing me at runtime.

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Racing is a very flawed analogy: the big difference between software development and racing is that:

1. F1 paths are known in advance.

2. The major unknowns in F1 are your competitor behaviors.

Compare that to a typical startup: you're mostly riding in the dark on a track you see for the first time, and your major unknown is customer behavior.

Interestingly, I learned this adage in object manipulation (festival fire or LED dancing - hoops, poi, staff, etc). The community breaks down things into “flow” and “technique”. Flow is highly improvisational, tech is highly practiced, and you really cannot do one without the other, even if everyone had a lean.

So: the steps in the path are known in advance, but not the order, presence/absence, quantity, arrangement, etc. The major unknown is what you will do next. The best performers are highly reactive to, and involved with, the audience and colleagues (musicians).

(This ofc changes for choreographed performance)

As a full stack dev, I’ve got a stack of patterns (techniques) in my pockets to pull out for this or that situation, but I don’t really get to know which one will be the next one I’ll need. And I do my best work when I can get involved with the end users, interacting with them to grok their needs; and with my coworkers, so we’re a team.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Reductionist history doesn't help here. Software development goes twenty or thirty years beyond startups.

I've crashed and burned startups while never comparing any of them to driving half-blind without my glasses at night.

Human sciences and user research provide excellent solutions to customer behavior. Like F1 cockpits, the risk scales with the domain.

F1 is not just a vector sport. If it were, math may be enough to win. Turns out F1 takes engineering, mechanics, and a driver.

However, viewed through a macroscope, F1 dynamics are closer to a cooperative game, as in software development.

While an unknown in software is competition, much larger unknowns are given by shifts in teams, machines, and their methods.

Turns out that comparing F1 and software development from 1970 to 2020 are remarkably the same story for much the same reason. Neither exist in stasis.

F1 and software development have more in common than is obvious from the grandstand.

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