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    Minimal conversion is far harder to create

    February 2nd, 2006

    “My conversion is going to be a minimal conversion - not a big overly expensive re-manufacture job.”

    Great minds think alike - the minimal conversion is far harder to create than the sledgehammer / smash to the skin style.

    And more fun to drive as it should be many tons lighter.

    And far easier to maintain!

    – FAST FRED

    [BNO Forum]


    Implicit Knowledge, Passed Along

    February 1st, 2006

    The reason I’ve included this excerpt here is to acknowledge, yet again, the contributions of those in the bus conversion and rving communities who tirelessly support each other and pass along their perspectives and learnings. You know who you are.

    …we’re going to toss around the words ‘culture’, ‘art’, and ‘philosophy’ a lot. If you are not a programmer, or you are a programmer who has had little contact with the Unix world, this may seem strange. But Unix has a culture; it has a distinctive art of programming; and it carries with it a powerful design philosophy. Understanding these traditions will help you build better software, even if you’re developing for a non-Unix platform.

    Every branch of engineering and design has technical cultures. In most kinds of engineering, the unwritten traditions of the field are parts of a working practitioner’s education as important as (and, as experience grows, often more important than) the official handbooks and textbooks. Senior engineers develop huge bodies of implicit knowledge, which they pass to their juniors by (as Zen Buddhists put it) “a special transmission, outside the scriptures.”

    From The Art of Unix Programming
    by Eric Steven Raymond.