As a kid, I had a friend who spoke with a New York accent.  He didn't pronounce the "H" in his "Hu"s.  We can hear this when Trump speaks, "Huge" become "Yuge."  Among our friends was a boy named "Hugh."  At one point my friend was reminiscing and asked me,  "You remember when Hugh XYZ'ed? That was so crazy." To which I responded, "I never did that." "No Hugh did." "No I don't remember ever doing that.  Seriously." "No Hugh did, Hugh." "Not me man, you're crazy."   At last, he added Hugh's last name, I caught on, and we had a good laugh.   I see this same pattern frequently in software and it goes like this: Observing the data, an engineer notes that two concepts behave uniformly Not being a subject matter expert, they make the decision to represent both concepts as one and the same.  After all, the parsimonious solution reduces space and complexity Some ti...

We're in a period of collective imagination.  The phenomenon is periodic in nature and at the heart of our economy.  A new idea comes in fashion, promising to stimulate innovation.  Capital chases it.  Markets expand in anticipation.  The idea may be little more than a fantasy at this point, "let's put people on the moon." Where there's a will there's a way.  Engineers race to realize the vision and capture the business for their owners before the competition does.  Some time later, some black and white version of the dream is realized.  Maybe the vision is still colorful to the layman, but the engineer's broken it down and rendered it mundane. It takes time to realize a vision.  Necessity is the mother of invention.  Innovation is problem solving.  Problem solving is a matter of fully exploring a problem space and understanding it.  This is primarily what engineers do, explore and define the boundaries of a problem space....