Item — HN Reader

Ah yes I completely forgot SRD -> TESTS -> Then Code. Maybe that's because we always did it the other way around...

I'm telling you, there's money to be made building tools for this stuff. I think a big part of the reason things aren't being improved is that the people in a position to recognize bad process and tooling maybe aren't the type of people to see an opportunity to make money solving the problem rather than putting up with it. I wouldn't associate most of the engineers I knew at Honeywell as the type to stay up until 2AM every night for 3 months working on a side project to pitch to their boss.

I think it's really exciting what's happening in healthcare right now though. The innovative culture is exploding. Ultimately I care much more about what happens in medicine than avionics, as long as planes aren't falling out of the sky every 248 days...

2 comments

There are already tools for this stuff. Problem is that they are all various forms of crappy and the market is so small that there is little incentive to improve them. I work in Medical Devices and one of the tools I'm supposed to use (we find every excuse to avoid it) has a UI like a 2001 Swing app and while it works, it is insanely painful to use due to its absolutely counterintuitive interface.

We're actually integrating more and more of our work in to Visual Studio since its tools are excellent. The problem is that the organization needs to validate any tool before we can use it as a part of Quality Management and that process can take forever.

Visual Studio is awesome. I'm really excited to see how Code turns out on Linux, especially for things like building GUI apps and 3D stuff.

I worked at Honeywell on these kinds of projects. I agree that these people definitely weren't that type. :)

Bizarrely now I am also helping (in a small way) with an innovative healthcare tech project. Maybe many people go through similar trajectories in programming without realizing it.