Topic
engineering
- Two roads to longevity
The latest issue of Res Extensa draws parallels between the story of Ford and Rolls-Royce and Stewart Brand's framework of Low Road and High Road design, from How Buildings Learn. We have polar opposite philosophies o…
- Highrises
An incredible project from Chris Hytha, documenting the gorgeous art deco architecture scattered across the country: The prosperity of early 20th century America resulted in a boom of skyscrapers that still tower over…
- Norway's Stad Ship Tunnel
Norway is in the planning stages on a tunnel for ships to bypass having to sail around the Stad peninsula, an infamously dangerous spot with high winds, rough waters, and foul weather. It's a 2km pathway under the bas…
- Megastructures
An interesting visual guide to fictional megastructures, like Larry Niven's Ringworld, Arcologies, and Dyson Spheres: Megastructures: The Visual Encyclopedia is part science book, part inspirational artbook. It contai…
- Framing and Shape Up
With Shape Up, the process of "shaping" new product takes investment to really understand and communicate an idea. But in the process, this precedes the "pitch", the step where the team reviews a shaped concept and bu…
- Weekend Reading: Robotic Bricklaying, Medici and Thiel, and Airtable, Roblox of the Enterprise
🧱 Where Are the Robotic Bricklayers? Brian Potter wonders why work as taxing and seemingly-mechanically simple as brick masonry is difficult to automate: Masonry seemed like the perfect candidate for mechanization, b…
- Weekend Reading: LightSpeed, Kubernetes, and a Car-Free Market Street
📱 Project LightSpeed: Rewriting the Messenger Codebase A technical piece describing the goals for Facebook’s rewrite of the Messenger app. Interesting to see them avoiding their own React Native for this, and doing t…
- Weekend Reading: Software Dependencies, Conversational AI, and the iPad at 10
🛠Dependency Drift: A Metric for Software Aging We've been doing some thinking on our team about how to systematically address (and repay) technical debt. With the web of interconnected dependencies and micro package…
- Microgravity Will Change How We Make Everything
Bloomberg has been publishing this video series on future technologies called "Giant Leap." It's well-done and a nice use of YouTube as a medium. This one explores a number of new companies doing R&D in microgravity m…
- The Tunnel of Samos
This is a fascinating article from a 2004 issue of Engineering & Science that investigates the "Tunnel of Samos", constructed on the eponymous Greek island 2500+ years ago. One of the greatest engineering achievements…