Making Software
104 comments
·April 14, 2025tenacious_tuna
rkuykendall-com
A cool recent one for large-scale infrastructure is "Engineering in Plain Sight":
progbits
I was disappointed in that one unfortunately.
Too much name dropping of random pieces without offering any insights why they are needed. You learn much more just skimming through a wiki article.
MisterTea
Amazing book for sure. David Macaulay has a few other books, four of which were turned into educational animated PBS specials. My mother got us the box set from PBS years ago.
berelig
I've been looking around for a book like this that has scientific/engineering topics presented in a bite-sized fashion so a teenager (or even adults) can discover which ones pique their interests and are worth a deeper dive.
Would this book work or is it a bit too simple? Does anyone have another book to recommend?
kobenni
For mathematics, there are the Princeton Companion to Mathematics and the Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics.
tenacious_tuna
it's been a couple decades since I've read it, but I'd buy it again as an adult. Like the peer comment says, "Engineering in Plain Sight" purports to be similar and I bought my dad a copy last christmas. Planning to spend some of my professionial development stipend on a copy this year.
kridsdale1
The Way Things Work is up to date. I loved it in the mid 90s and just bought a new copy for my kid this year. It has SSDs, OLEDs, Gravity Wave Detection, etc.
Acrobatic_Road
I had the same thought. I don't remember if it was exactly this book, but I remember reading a book that explained all kinds of engineering concepts for my kid brain. And I remember the latter part of the book had some computer science content like how compression works.
vunderba
If it had an abundance of woolly mammoths then it was likely this book. Highly recommended - covers everything from reactors to pin tumbler locks.
Apfel
Stunningly beautiful landing page. I would never normally comment on the aesthetics of anything in the dev sphere but that completely blew me away. I'll preorder for sure.
I'd echo the other comment mentioning that a coffee-table version of this would be great.
dimal
Agreed, it's aesthetically beautiful. It should be a coffee table book. But for the web, it has terrible usability. Really, really terrible in multiple ways. My comments will be harsh, but since the creator is obviously very skilled, he should know better.
Why multicolumn text? So it looks like an old printed manual? At first view, it's not clear where the first column ends. This is not something we see on the web (because there's no need for it), so it's not clear that the content flows from one column to the next. When the viewport is sized to two columns, I need to scroll down to finish the first column, then scroll back up to read where it continues on the second column.
Justified text is bad on the web. We're starting to get some better features to make it usable, but it's not widely supported, so right ragged text is always more readable.
There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.
I'm sure there are more issues but the site is so unusable for me, I won't continue trying.
So, yeah. It's gorgeous design. I love it. But it's for the sake of aesthetics, not for the user's sake. It's completely unusable to me. Since this is the first installment, I hope the designer will keep the aesthetics but improve the usability in future installments.
dsego
> Justified text is bad on the web.
Is there any reason why justified is okay printed but not on the web.
wavemode
Beause in print you would typically use your publishing software to adjust various things, like where hypenated word breaks should happen. This is much trickier in digital media, and usually just isn't done, resulting in ugly word spacing.
vunderba
I'd like to see some sources on this. I've seen good and bad examples of justified text, and it's also highly dependent on the font as well.
Narishma
> There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.
And pegs the CPU and drains the battery.
oneoverten
Those animations wont "peg" any relevant CPU, and they clearly had a purpose that was not about wasting cycles or battery.
croemer
On mobile there's far too much white space between sections, there are almost entire screens of nothing.
salomonk_mur
Disagree on the animations. They are both beautiful and detailed, clearly illustrating the point.
Your other criticism I agree with.
dimal
I agree that they are beautiful and detailed, clearly illustrating the point. I really, really love them. I'd love to have them on my wall.
That's not my problem. My problem is that they never stop animating. For me and many other people, when something is moving in our visual field, it is very, very difficult to read the text next to it.
Full disclosure: I'm autistic. I was wondering whether I should mention that. All the issues that I mentioned exclude me from using this resource. So maybe we could call these accessibility issues instead of usability issues. When I disclose that I'm autistic, it tends to evoke two types of responses:
1) Oh, sorry, we'll make it accessible. But they do it out of shame, which I don't like. I'd rather it's out of empathy.
2) You're too small of a segment to care about.
But I'm beginning to think that the only difference between usability and accessibility is the size of the population that's being excluded by the design. I chose to keep my autisticness separate to see how people responded when I presented this as a usability issue instead of an accessibility issue.
I'm only asking that designers have empathy for all possible users of their media. That's all. That's what good design is supposed to do.
neogodless
Looked up the author's main site:
> Dan Hollick.
> Design, technically.
Blogs about using Figma to create things (like this).
georgewsinger
The author should make a meta-entry about how he makes the (insanely beautiful) diagrams in the book (ideally walking through the process).
psadauskas
In the FAQ:
07 How do you make the illustrations?
By hand, in Figma. There's no secret - it's as complicated as it looks.tonyhart7
using hand??? not after effect ?
god damn, that's some patient making animation right there
__loam
Respect
behnamoh
He has more content with figures on another platform: https://typefully.com/DanHollick
ivl
The pair of animations on the page are beautifully done, not just technically but aesthetically as well. If the rest of the book is like that I'll be getting a copy.
vivzkestrel
Commendable effort, i would also like to recommend some topics/chapters/lessons whatever you want to call it - How microprocessors and microcontrollers work - Types of storage => RAM / ssd/ hdd / flash drives and storage formats NTFS, FAT32 - OS stuff (theading, multiprocessing, coroutines, scheduling, paging, priority) - Some data structures stuff (trees, stacks, queues, graphs etc)
joshbaptiste
CoreDumpped https://www.youtube.com/@CoreDumpped on YT is also a great animated reference or refresher on such topics..
vivzkestrel
also would like to add a section about packets, network packets, tcp packets, udp packets, http packets. would be real nice to see what each packet is like in a very visually friendly way
felipemesquita
The subtitle “A reference manual for people who design and build software” seems at odds with the description:
> This book won’t teach you how to actually make software […] It’s a manual that explains how the things you use everyday actually work. You don’t need to be technical to read this - there are a lot of pictures and diagrams to do the heavy lifting. You just need to be curious.
dijksterhuis
A thing for a specific audience, not a thing with a specific purpose, is how i read the subtitle.
the subtitle doesnt say what the reference manual is a reference for. just that software people might like it.
jaapz
Audience: people who design and build software
Subject: how the things used every day by people who design and build software work
Not the subject: how to design and build software
chromanoid
yeah, I totally agree.
It's like there was a shift in goals after the author made the title. Maybe explaining the basics was so much fun, that the initial idea got lost... I also don't think knowing how a crt monitor works is instrumental for people who want to make software. The domain is cool, but it doesn't match the content. whatissoftware.com might be better.
when it is explained how pixel, gpu or llm work, I would at least expect some intro to Von-Neumann-Architecture.
meindnoch
The table of contents seems to have a whole chapter on "AI and ML" before starting the next chapter with "What is a byte?". Funny.
0xEF
I'm getting the impression that the book will not be organized in any real linear or iterative order, just sections that allow you to jump around and read what you want.
croemer
I'm confused, I can't find the content anywhere. I clicked on the TOC items but that just underlined the words. Is this just an announcement?
falcor84
Yes, just an announcement. There's an FAQ at the bottom:
>When will it launch?
> I'm not entirely sure yet. I'd love to get it out before the European summer this year. It's a lot of work to illustrate everything so you might need to have some patience.
skadamat
There seems to be some content previews here: https://typefully.com/DanHollick
XCSme
Nice landing page, but I'm confused. The header is about software, but many diagrams are about hardware.
stronglikedan
It'll come in handy for when I try to destroy a hard drive by getting the actuator arm to move back and forth at the drive's harmonic frequency.
robocat
When your finger gets close to the [touch] screen it causes a disturbance in the *magnetic* field that the electrodes sense.
marcosdumay
Well, it's a disturbance on the AC properties... so both.
But yeah, we usually talk about capacitance as an "electrical-only" phenomenon. It's quite weird to se it referred as magnetic.
constantcrying
How do you cause a disturbance in an electric field without causing a disturbance in the magnetic field?
robocat
To imply capacitive touch sensing uses magnetics is just so wrong - I can't imagine how someone trying to be technical could make such an egregious error.
A material can affect an electric field without affecting a magnetic field: electrically conductive (versus insulator that won't affect a field so much except via dielectric effects).
A material can affect a magnetic field without much affecting an electric field e.g. ferrites are non-conducting.
A finger changes the capacitance between two "plates" and that is what is detected.
Also the attached drawing shows diamonds but I've only ever seen flat wires myself (when looking closely at touch screens you can sometimes see the transparent sense wires). But I'm no specialist and I don't know how correct the drawing is.
constantcrying
Changes in the electric field of a capacitor cause changes in the magnetic field.
Electric and magnetic fields aren't Independent. Again, I asked about disturbances, Maxwells equations make it pretty obvious that changes in one cause changes in the other.
kmoser
The illustrations are definitely the secret sauce that makes this so engaging and informative. I'd also like to see links to where I can learn more about particular topics online. For example:
> Or maybe you’ve wondered why we call it a Gaussian blur?
Nowhere is Carl Friedrich Gauss mentioned, which is unfortunate. This should really link to the Wikipedia entry for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur.
sfn42
When you know the term gaussian (blur) it's trivial to do a Google search
internetter
Google does not return the best content.
sfn42
It usually returns good enough content for me
kookamamie
Looks like form-over-function to me. Cool looks, little content.
scubbo
It's just an announcement page, for now.
clausz
How old is this? Copyright at the bottom of the page says "1990".
gregschlom
I think it's a cool little easter egg. Goes well with the technical illustration of a 3.5" floppy disk at the top and the pixelated font for the titles.
Also, maybe the author meant to say he started thinking about this book since 1990, too.
Either way the copyright year doesn't matter. You can put anything
This reminds me aesthetically of The Way Things Work [1] which was one of my favorite books as a kid. Having a similar wordly reference as an adult has been a goal for a while.
[1] https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/the-way-things-work-newly-revise...