TwistedWeasel

last 50 years of change includes modern nail guns, engineered lumber, hurricane anchors, plywood roof sheathing, vapor barriers, and countless other differences in how homes are built and the tools we use to do it. There is nothing special about software, other industries also evolve and grow their methods and tools. We just change software with reckless abandon and little regard for the reasons we started down any given path in the first place.

yep, both are significantly different in many way, houses built 50 years ago have a lot of differences to modern houses. Software from 50 years ago, is also significantly different but the fundamentals of both are the same, foundations, walls, roof trusses, siding, filesystems, operating systems, processes, threads, data structures etc. We may use Go instead of C and we may use engineered lumber instead of Douglas Fir for door headers.

The whole point of my last comment was that the impact of bad software cannot be fully understood if we don't have ways to monitor and measure it. You are correct that many industries have high standards and many other industries have no need for any standards as market forces will decide, but there's likely a huge grey area in between that we don't know much about.

if you look at it economically, maybe. It's a complex problem. The economy doesn't benefit from contractor licensing either, but the consistency reliability and quality of our infrastructure does.

Are you sure? Construction materials are evolving and changing every few years (engineered lumber, modern environmentally friendly methods, etc) whilst we still use base operating systems designed in the 60's for most of our services.

Left up to private enterprise they will set their standards to the lowest they can get away with to maximize profits and reduce the time to market.

At NASA, sure. You can't say that with any certainty for all the other systems in the world where software has a huge impact on daily life and human wellbeing. We can't know for sure because there is no regulation or independent monitoring.

How do you define mature? Is it about stability? There are newer and more modern methods of construction and engineering and the field is always evolving. Maturity in those fields is about consistency and agreements of best practices enforced by standards and regulations. Software is not mature because it's not regulated. If you want software engineering to mature and stabilize, it needs more regulation.

It's complicated so we should just not care?

web apps are a small fraction of the software development world. Software Engineers are responsible for code that runs in hospitals, aircraft, power switching stations, and many many other safety critical systems. In many cases code that was never written for safety critical work is deployed in those environments. What OS and software runs the elevator controls in a hospital or military base? We never know the real impact of our work.

plumbers, electricians, civil engineers, architects, structural engineers, etc. All these occupations have licensing requirements. Why is software different?

I'm with you, we should approach problems with optimism not fear. However, teaching that approach to kids is a long term strategy, and helping them adapt to a new routine is a slow process, it's less about the difficulty and more about the emotional cost that you have to pay to succeed.

I have three kids, all elementary school age and I am prepping to start the school year all remote. I'm not afraid of the challenge but i'm honest with myself that it will take a toll on my kids and my marriage that I cannot avoid. No matter how hard I work, it will take time and getting into the routine cannot be done overnight.

It's okay to be daunted by that prospect.

My results show 1.3s for HTTP/1.1 and 3.0 seconds for HTTP/2 using Chrome on OS X. So, this demo wasn't very impressive for me.

Same bug for Utah...

In 2014 the Utah software industry gave jobs to 1 foreign software managers, Infinity times more than the year before. Most of them made between $NaN and $NaN per year. The best city for software managers was South Jordan with an average salary of $165,000.

Once you scale your worker pool up beyond a couple of machines you need some sort of config management with Celery. We use SaltStack to manage a large pool of celery workers and it does a pretty good job.