Fantastic book! Really enjoyed the learnings of best practices in software engineering on big products.

Of course the, 9 women can’t make a baby in 1 month is a nice takeaway.

I really appreciated his take that software is grown, not built. When developing software, I feel like things change so quickly and require modification that it’s easy to urge the software in that direction. Can’t do that with a cut die for a stamped piece in manufacturing.

Another point I liked is that, unlike other engineering disciplines, software is leveled against human paradigms. For mechanical engineering, the conversion of kinetic energy to heat in a brake system will always be underpinned by the same physical reality. There are no instances where that formula will change in the real world. However, in software, you are constructing everything against something human created. The human created compiler. The human created language, etc. Those things changes, they’re sometimes they’re wrong.

In mechanical engineering, I’d never have to worry that because of Real World V2.0 they patched the Kinetic energy law and it behaves different now.

Software, you fight against man made realities which are fallible.

All in all, fantastic book that is still applicable today, 50 years later.

5/5