Am a civil engineer working in tech now. I never felt like engineering was magical, we studied materials and stresses and tested stuff and built things.

While I know software engineers basically do the same things in a digital concept (hardware included) they are basically speaking arcane words that make the machine do things like conjure up images, transport information across the world at the speed of light.

Maybe fantasy writers should write more infrastructure into their stories for their wizards, like undersea cables or satellites built by the generations before

  • fckreddit
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    10 months ago

    To demystify the tech a little, the recommend the book Elements of Computing Systems.

    BTW, I am also a Civil Engineer working in Tech. Computers can be pretty interesting at the lower levels, in my experience.

    • UsernameIsTooLon@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      10 months ago

      Yes like high end computing is cool and all, but forcing an extremely low end chip to do something technical is always incredible.