A quip I picked up from a Boeing engineer:
“Engineering is designing failure.”
Obviously that has darker tones in aerospace, but I think it applies to even CRUD apps:
- my app will choke and fall over if TPS exceeds 1k/sec
- my app will drop data when we exceed 2TiB in the DB total
- etc.
You’re “engineering” when you design and control those modes in your system.
That's funny to me.
Actually, I don't even know why call it negative engineering. That should be engineering, period.