The CEO of the start-up Boom that produces civilian super-sounds 12 years ago I founded Boom. I was a programmer who started designing physical products, and I remain probably the least active founder in the tech industry. My 12 year old son does all the soldering and 3D printing for my home projects while I struggle with imposter syndrome. What right does a programmer have to create planes and supersonic turbines? More than a decade later, I came to an amazing realization: software is the key to accelerating the engineering development of physical products. Moreover, in a way that it seems to me is still not sufficiently understood and not used practically even in the rapidly developing community of developers of complex technical systems. A lot of physical product engineering is actually software engineering in disguise. This is "code" in spreadsheets, engineering calculations performed each time as a separate task. For example: the loads on the wing structure are applied to the input, and at the output the dimensions of the spils are obtained. At the entrance are thermal loads, at the exit are the parameters of the air conditioning system. It all boils down to calculations, and calculations are software. But these calculations are performed almost manually, as if we know how to count, but haven't discovered algebra yet. Engineers who design physical products have primitive software built into spreadsheets. I wrote roughly the same low-quality software in my childhood, when I still didn't understand what architecture, unit tests, APIs, version control and everything that makes modern software high-quality is. Our planes and engines are built using software about the same level of maturity as a novice hacker's scripts.

The CEO of the start-up Boom that produces civilian super-sounds 12 years ago I founded Boom. I was a programmer who started designing physical products, and I remain probably the least active founder in the tech industry. My 12 year old son does all the soldering and 3D printing for my home projects while I struggle with imposter syndrome. What right does a programmer have to create planes and supersonic turbines? More than a decade later, I came to an amazing realization: software is the key to accelerating the engineering development of physical products. Moreover, in a way that it seems to me is still not sufficiently understood and not used practically even in the rapidly developing community of developers of complex technical systems. A lot of physical product engineering is actually software engineering in disguise. This is "code" in spreadsheets, engineering calculations performed each time as a separate task. For example: the loads on the wing structure are applied to the input, and at the output the dimensions of the spils are obtained. At the entrance are thermal loads, at the exit are the parameters of the air conditioning system. It all boils down to calculations, and calculations are software. But these calculations are performed almost manually, as if we know how to count, but haven't discovered algebra yet. Engineers who design physical products have primitive software built into spreadsheets. I wrote roughly the same low-quality software in my childhood, when I still didn't understand what architecture, unit tests, APIs, version control and everything that makes modern software high-quality is. Our planes and engines are built using software about the same level of maturity as a novice hacker's scripts.