So I decided to search the definition of engineering on the internet because I've heard this whole "software engineering is not engineering" thing before:
> Engineering (from Latin ingenium, meaning "cleverness" and ingeniare, meaning "to contrive, devise") is the application of scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to invent, design, build, maintain, research, and improve structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes.
So, software "engineering" definitely involves the use of scientific, economic, social and practical knowledge to build, maintain, research, and improve devices, systems, and processes. So that, in my lowly opinion, makes it engineering "in the strictest sense of the term".
Arguing about semantics is extremely stupid if you are not a PHD in linguistics.
I don't think it uses science, other than scientifically studied development processes, and how many start ups use thast? If you count computer science, I'd kick the can down the road and ask if computer science is a real science? Does it use the scientific method? It seems more as applied mathematics.
Science involves the application of the scientific method. Take academic research, for example. Engineering may involve the scientific method, but it isn't required to validate that scientific knowledge was used. Scientific knowledge could be an algorithm for autonomous environment mapping. Implementing that in an autonomous car and ensuring system functionality in the many possible environments it might end up in, that is certainly a feat of engineering.
What is the difference between this and Cassandra? A more powerful querying language?
Cassandra already has Consistency Levels with Replication Strategies. I feel like the only way to get powerful querying out of a system like this would be to have a map reduce layer on top of your db which is what many do to get powerful querying from cassandra.
This is purpose built for this use case. The MapReduce system you talk about is part of what's built in. Each aggregate function in the query language is represented as a MapReduce job that gets run on the fly.
The other part of it is that we're optimized for this use case. I've built "time series databases" on top of Cassandra before. It requires a great deal of application level code and hacking to get things like retention policies and continuous queries, which are built into InfluxDB.
When people are saying the certificate is worthless they mean that when applying for a job, employers do not care if you have completed a mooc or not. A Mooc's value doesn't come from the fact that you finish the course, it comes from the fact that you've learned something new from great teachers. With the knowledge from that mooc you should then do something which you can then show to whomever.
