Industrial Engineering

A recent episode of Latent Space with Joon Sung Park, co-founder of Simile AI, caused a strange flashback to my student days in industrial engineering. Long before anyone talked about generative AI, we learned to use a piece of software called Arena to build probabilistic simulations of airports, supermarkets, factories, and other complex systems. The basic idea was simple and surprisingly powerful. Instead of changing the real system, you built a simplified version of it on a computer. Customers arrived according to some probability distribution. A cashier took a variable amount of time to serve them. Queues formed, resources became occupied and available again. You could add another checkout lane, change the staffing level, or rearrange a production line, run the simulation thousands of times, and see what happened before spending money in the real world. ...

Early in my career, coming from industrial engineering, I learned a simple rule that has shaped the way I think about software development ever since. Software may look abstract, creative, fluid. But underneath, it behaves like a production system. The best articulation of this idea appears in The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, one of the most influential books I have ever read. In production, every system revolves around three outputs you can influence: ...