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A physician’s son | The Observation Deck

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A physician’s son | The Observation Deck

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A physician’s son

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My father is an emergency medical physician, a fact that has had a subtle but discernable influence on my career as a software engineer. Emergency medicine and software engineering are of course very different problems, and even though there are times when a major and cascading software systems failure can make a datacenter feel like an urban emergency room on a busy Saturday night, the reality is that if we software engineers screw up, people don’t generally die. (And while code and machine can both be metaphorically uncooperative, we don’t really have occasion to make a paramedic sandwich.) Not only are the consequences less dire, but the underlying systems themselves are at opposite ends of a kind of spectrum: one is deterministic yet brittle, the other sloppy yet robust. Despite these differences, I believe that medicine has much to teach us in software engineering; two specific (if small) artifacts of medicine that I have incorporated into my career:

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A physician’s son | The Observation Deck

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