Getting a sense for how big design spaces can be

I was recently reading Design Beyond Human Abilities. It has some neat points about how to define design, but that what all definitions seem to encompass is the idea of activities you do before building something. Furthermore, the author lists three strategies for how you go about design. He calls them three "metadesign spaces" -- in each space there are non-overlapping designs you can come up with using the assumptions of the meta space.

The work comes originally from Adrian Thompson and others. The three metadesign spaces I'll characterize by the terms "Abstract", "Iterative", and "Evolution". In the first, abstraction, the key assumption is that there is a tractable inverse model. That is, you can look at an example of the thing you want to build, or get sufficient data about it, and then work backwards to produce an abstract plan -- a blueprint, say -- and from this abstract plan more or less any competent craftsman in the field can go off and build a pretty near exact replica of the original thing.

A lot of things can fall under this category (hence, blueprints) and some software is among them. The idealized "waterfall" methodology works ok for it -- you do your design up front which involves gathering all the requirements of the final thing someone wants into a formal plan, then execute.

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Shell shocking events

Imagine it's the start of your work day and you've decided to dig into a recently filed bug. You go to pull the latest version of a project on github, only to discover that you can't.

Why not? Turns out the company network has decided to block requests to github. No one knows why. There's a bunch of headless chickens running around in ops trying to at least restore service (and figure out why), they give updates every 30 minutes. Hours will pass before it's resolved.

What do you do during those hours? Technically you don't need the latest version of the project to spin things up, it's unlikely this bug is only present for the latest changes. Some days, you might just soldier on. Spin up the local copy you had, debug, you can eventually make a pull request with the fix whenever the network issue is resolved.

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