FWIW I've been saying it in a sarcastic way since I was in my teens because of the Simpsons where Bart says "It's a load bearing poster." I assume if anyone uses the phrase (that isn't like a civil engineer) it probably came from here lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRVExJZKIT8
I’m developing BaseRef (https://getbaseref.com), a requirements/risk/test management and documentation SaaS tool focused on medical device startups. There are competitors in the space but most are enterprise tools for enterprise customers. My primary differentiators are reasonable up-front prices, and easy inclusion of traced items in a wiki/notion-like collaborative document editor. It’s not a sexy or original idea, but I think there is a gap in the market for a solid business. I’ve been an embedded software consultant for medical device startups for years, but this is my first SaaS business.
That's interesting. Traceability from Requirements to Architecture & Design (in both directions) is an issue that I've thought of building a tool for after coming across some projects that were doing a bad job of managing it. Risk & HA seem like they'd want to be in a separate tool, though.
Suggestion for your landing page: state what FDA submission docs the tool will generate and maybe mention 62304 compliance.
It’s funny, when I’ve seen this demonstrated, it’s basically literally impossible to get the right result because the test maker doesn’t define an instruction set that you can rely on. They will deliberately screw up whatever instructions you give them no matter how detailed. A computer has a defined ISA that is specified in terms of behavior. A compiler transforms a language with higher level abstractions into this low-level language. I’ve never seen this “test” done with any similar affordance, which doesn’t really teach anything.
Oh I think this lesson teaches quite a lot. Maybe your instructor is deliberately screwing up, but perhaps other end users are just not paying attention, or are missing assumed knowledge, or are feeling particularly adversarial on the day they need to follow your instructions.
One of many lessons that can be taken away from this exercise is to understand your audience and challenge the assumptions you make about their prior knowledge, culture, kind of peanut butter, et deters.
I suppose. My original comment should have been “doesn’t teach you how to program.” It would be great to do it the normal way first, then point out that it’s impossible to do without a contract of behavior in place, then start creating that instruction set and building up from there. It is in fact possible to program computers, so this method would teach what makes programming possible.
One of the best parties I’ve been to in my life was the reception after a funeral for my wife’s great-aunt. Generations of relatives and family friends, some of whom hadn’t seen each other in thirty years, took over their house from after the ceremony at noon until 10pm that night. It was a rager.
I built a variant to very successfully estimate state of charge for a large battery pack in a production hybrid-electric vehicle.
Often some tweaks from the standard formula are necessary to account for real-world non-linearities, and some creative design work is required to define states in such a way that the Gaussian noise assumption can hold well enough.
Wrightspeed did this a while (10 years?) ago. It looks like they have since pivoted to fully electric powertrains for buses, but when they first started they were doing range-extending hybrid powertrains for heavy trucks. I found an article the describes the system at the time:
With a range-extender hybrid system, you can keep the turbine closer to its peak-efficiency operating point, since it only has to handle steady-state load while the battery takes up the spikes. Not sure how it would do up a long grade, but I imagine they designed for that.
I’m excited about Slint. It’s great to have a solid Qt alternative for embedded UIs. I doubt I will need to use it on a MCU rather than an embedded Linux processor, but even so, it’s also nice to know that it’s lightweight.
