“do you want fish and chips? or maybe a stir fry tonight?”
well, you see, in engineering, we’re always making tradeoffs. it’s really important to consider the context we’re operating in - what are our goals, where can we accept imperfection if it helps us meet specification? do we need perfection to a fault under some measures, or are we more interested in a balance? is cost an issue? it’s quite interesting just how defining these questions are - a solution which is fit for purpose in one context may be wholly unsuitable in another. if we’re honest with ourselves too, we can often relax a lot of specifications we’ve decided upon and deemed necessary for a successful solution to meet; it’s very easy to overestimate how good we actually require a certain solution to be. i’d recommend some kind of structured decision making strategy which allows you to weight requirements and assign scores to each solution in a way that can be easily modified a you discover hidden requirements, your requirements change, or a solution simply becomes better at meeting some specifications.
“we're having fucking fish, ok”
