Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2003)

>16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours. >19. The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the…

I have a subset of these printed out and tacked to a cork board in my office, and I refer to this website a few times a year. Very, very good stuff. This one in particular was a big influence on me when I moved from engineering to design. It expressed what I'd felt but hadn't put into words. Not just the look, but nearly every aspect of a project is de facto path dependent, so you want to be…

> #20 A bad design with a good presentation is doomed > eventually. A good design with a bad presentation > is doomed immediately. This should be the Y Combinator motto. It is one of the axioms that is represented here again and again, both explicitly and implicitly.

> 36. Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective. I feel like you could permute "elegant", "efficient", and "effective" in any way here and still arrive with a maxim that sounds nice but doesn't really say anything.