HACKER Q&A
📣 bckr

Words for work that isn't glue?


A lot of development is just getting requests at some endpoint and transforming them to submit to some other endpoint, combining with information from 3rd parties, etc.

One reason I'm a bit tired of this work is that working with 3rd parties, while perhaps a necessary business reality, is... "crumbly".

But, I think, some work is like:

* creating things that didn't exist before

* interacting with the physical world

* taking existing software and making it run an order of magnitude faster

Are there any words, phrases, concepts that would help me move toward these kinds of work?

Or do you want to talk me out of thinking in these categories?

Thanks.

  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
Glue work can be very creative. In fact, having a bunch of prebuilt components lets you focus on what is really original about a project. I've got a side project that involves projecting a video game character like so

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost

and this would not be practical for me to do at all if I couldn't get frameworks for character animations and even whole characters "out of the box".

Physical world work is often called "embedded systems". If you want to learn to do that kind of thing for fun get an Arduino board and some parts to go with it and start coding.

Software development is often divided into "applications programming" and "systems programming", the later is going to involve radical speedups, compilers, and most advanced techniques.

👤 eesmith
"Methods development" or "algorithms development"

"Performance tuning" or "Performance optimization"

"Performance critical"

"ADA"

"real-time"