For my programming buddies

O'Reilly has a brief piece on the distinction between engineers and software developers, Why We're Not Really Engineers (via reddit.com). I'm not a coder, but I can appreciate the programming process being improved. Better development processes, better software. More productivity for the rest of us.

While wer'e on the topic, Oracle Security Officer Mary Ann Davidson recently criticized the software industry and its culture of "patch, patch, patch."

"What if civil engineers built bridges the way developers write code?" she asked. "What would happen is that you would get the blue bridge of death appearing on your highway in the morning."

Hopefully tools like Alloy will lead to less "blue bridges of death".