A dryly humorous, pragmatic handbook for understanding the physical roots and digital realities of engineering vernacular.
Hard: Temporary steel frames used so construction workers don’t plummet into lawsuits.
Soft: The automatically generated code that gives your project just enough structure to stop developers from building a second framework “because it felt cleaner.”
Hard: Identical metal plates cranked out by Victorian-era machines.
Soft: The lines of code we repeat endlessly because compilers still can’t infer intent and product managers still can’t infer limits.
Hard: Industrial-strength adhesive meant for bonding incompatible materials.
Soft: The invisible duct tape between libraries clearly written by people who never spoke to each other.
Hard: Joints intentionally placed so materials can flex without shattering.
Soft: Strategic fault lines that let you change code without rewriting half the company’s infrastructure.
Hard: Oxidation and material decay over time.
Soft: The slow erosion of context and clarity until your system resembles the ruins of a once-great civilization.
Hard: Metal conductors that route electricity where it’s supposed to go.
Soft: The web of service calls and dependencies where your system’s behavior allegedly resides.
Hard: Pipes, valves, and drains designed to move fluids with minimal leakage.
Soft: Data pipelines and JSON geysers—usually leaking exactly where no one expects.
Hard: The glossy finish that hides your plumbing’s sordid secrets.
Soft: The high-level interface users mistake for the whole system—mostly because they’ve never seen your backend.
Hard: The boundary exposed to the world.
Soft: Every public endpoint, flag, or toggle—each a new way for someone to summon undefined behavior.
Hard: Cues that suggest appropriate use.
Soft: API hints that gently steer developers toward correctness, which they will enthusiastically ignore.
Hard: A region of hardware under thermal stress.
Soft: The 5% of code responsible for 95% of performance issues.
Hard: Areas rarely heated.
Soft: Code that executes once per fiscal year and fails every single time.
Hard: The extent of damage from an explosion.
Soft: The number of teams alerted when your microservice reenacts a disaster movie.
Hard: A narrow channel where flow collapses.
Soft: That one service that tops out at 17 requests per second but somehow handles payroll.
Hard: Panels full of knobs directing machinery.
Soft: The YAML-driven hallucination layer where configurations believe they influence reality.
Hard: Conveyor belts hauling material.
Soft: The part of the system actually doing work while the control plane holds meetings.
Hard: Fluid resistance when downstream is blocked.
Soft: The system’s increasingly desperate hints that you should stop sending requests before everything melts down.
Hard: Undeliverable mail dumped into bureaucratic oblivion.
Soft: Messages that gave up on life and moved to the place where debugging dreams go to die.
Hard: Turn it on and verify nothing catches fire.
Soft: The minimal test suite confirming your deploy hasn’t turned your infrastructure into a cautionary tale.
Hard: A small bird detecting toxic gases by dying heroically.
Soft: The first instance deployed to production—fully prepared to perish for system stability.
Hard: A rig preventing catastrophic falls.
Soft: The padded room where you experiment on code without taking down production.
Hard: A gun easy to accidentally fire at yourself.
Soft: An API designed with enough optimism to assume humans read documentation.
Hard: Corners that cut you.
Soft: The places where small mistakes become major outages.
Hard: Tiny injuries with outsized annoyance.
Soft: Hundreds of small frictions that silently drain morale.
Hard: Hidden traps.
Soft: Historical accidents disguised as design decisions.
Hard: A ritual requiring too many steps.
Soft: Process overhead that proudly prevents shipping while achieving nothing measurable.
Hard: Grooming a yak for reasons best left unexamined.
Soft: Doing five unrelated tasks before the actual task, because now they are “critical.”
Hard: Debating the color of a shed instead of building anything.
Soft: The instinct to argue about trivialities because real work requires thought.
Hard: The smoothest route from A to B.
Soft: The officially blessed engineering approach that minimizes outages and postmortems.
Hard: Applying excessive force to a delicate object.
Soft: Proposing a rewrite because two functions have similar names.
Hard: A temporary patch used in emergencies.
Soft: A fix that becomes permanent the moment someone writes, “Good enough for now.”