. @SteveDanna posted a link to https://ferd.ca/a-pipeline-made-of-airbags.html in our work slack, and my brain has run down the rabbit hole of engineering aesthetics and why we make the design decisions we do and why we are so bad at talking about them.

I think engineering aesthetic decisions are interesting because we try to pretend that we don't make them. They are the place where our unspoken beliefs about what good engineering/systems/code looks like and what it should accomplish and for whom go to hide.

If you want to pretend that every engineering decision you make has a pragmatic point to it, I'm not stopping you; I just don't believe it.

Take the typical engineering "It feels cleaner." "Clean" is an aesthetic judgement disguised as a pragmatic one. What does it mean that "clean" is the desired aesthetic?

Note to self that Christina Codgell's book might be useful/relevant in thinking about this stuff:

https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14070.html