• Question: what is your worst design

    Asked by 11jakrobb4 to Andy, Bill, Grant, Kayleigh, Rain on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Bill Price

      Bill Price answered on 16 Mar 2012:


      I did a design for a school a long time ago in Croydon. As a piece of honest structural engineering its not good. There are beams and floors hanging from structure above when it would have been easy and more logical to use a simple column arrangement. Its all a bit contrived so its not good when I put my orgainsed engineering hat on. The school is really popular and very successful though so Im still proud of my involvement. STuff like this makes engineers think in different ways about what we are doing.

    • Photo: Andrew Hearn

      Andrew Hearn answered on 16 Mar 2012:


      I think the beauty of software is we can easily change our code if something isn’t turning out right, so there hasn’t been a “worst” design delivered to the customer. Sometimes we have to work around any hardware weirdness, such as forcing it to reset itself after a boot-up – things that we as software engineers can’t change, but to find a way around.

      But I’ve experienced a worst working method – it was when I was brought on board of another project to help other engineers finish it on time, and the code plus documentation was in a real mess – it was hard-going figuring out what was what, and I’ve had to redo quite a lot of code just to get it working. So good software engineers always add comments to their code to tell other engineers what the code is supposed to be doing, and to explain anything complex.

    • Photo: Rain Irshad

      Rain Irshad answered on 16 Mar 2012:


      When I was at school I had to do textiles. I designed a cushion. For babies. It was black and pink. And awful.

      I don’t do sewing. Or cushions.

      Babies, I quite like.

    • Photo: Kayleigh Messer

      Kayleigh Messer answered on 19 Mar 2012:


      Probably something I designed at university!

    • Photo: Grant Cairnie

      Grant Cairnie answered on 19 Mar 2012:


      I designed and made a door hinge for one project. Not particularly inspiring but it seemed to work okay.

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