It's weirdly comforting, almost homely, being back here at Literally Engineering, on Typepad, after all those years away (my last active post here was in 2015: the ones you see below were imported from my other blog, engiphy). I'd as good as forgotten about Literally Engineering until I found an ancient link to it whilst cleaning up old bookmarks in my browser. Curious, I clicked, and found, to my surprise, that (aided by the magic of a password app) it all still worked!

The comfort and homeliness stems from the look and feel of the place, where, in this day and age of perpetual updates, beautification and simplification, nothing seems to have changed since I last visited. The Typepad dashboard and management pages still look like a 1990s blog throwback: and I like it! So I paid the subscription again to be able to select and modify some vaguely appealing themes beyond the absolute basic standard, and started drafting this post.

From our archives...

Whilst I was typing, my curiosity extended to what Literally Engineering in its various guises was about. Remembering to save the draft, I checked back to my very first post here, from 2012, called, simply, "On Engineering". In it, I had stated that I wanted to write about

...what engineers actually do. I mean on a day to day basis. Yes, we solve all the world's problems, we turn ideas into reality, we make things and their processes more efficient, cheaper - we optimise - but what do we actually do? All day?

Was that... philosophy?

I created my now interim engineering blog, engiphy, with the intention of focussing on my own developing ideas within the domain of the philosophy of engineering. Engiphy was fine - but, if I'm honest, I found that limiting myself to the philosophy of engineering ran the danger of the blog ending up being a bit stuffy (though I always try not to let my writing become that). I also found myself reading more than posting, then kind of forgetting what I'd read, re-reading, trying to take notes from the stuff that I'd highlighted, and getting lost in all of that uncertainty and vagueness, rather than actively writing again (a key component to understanding, which should then be enriched by discourse). I also caught myself getting distracted by the general "busyness" of Wordpress with its frequent updates and plugin management and "SEO optimisation": the slightly clunky simplicity of Typepad is another key benefit of this return.

So, on a whim, I exported engiphy from WordPress and imported it all - remarkably simply! - here. And now, on the tip of 2023, I'm reanimating Literally Engineering (/On Engineering) to discuss my engineering life, and the philosophy around it.

To answer the header question: no, it wasn't philosophy in the active sense. I was asking what engineers do, more as a list of activities, without enquiring into what we are. More pertinently, I had at that point never really thought about the philosophies of knowledge, of existence and being, of perception and interpretation: never actively considered the multiple layers and perspectives of what it is to be a human and, more specifically, what it means to be a member of that peculiar subset of humanity, an engineer.

So I feel it's time to recombine my old interest in describing this engineering life with my newer interest in philosophy, and to start typing away here.

Being philosophical

Funnily enough, between starting this post and finishing it, the company that employed me... required me to put that employment into the past tense. It's been a bit of a roller coaster ride, I will admit, a combination of feeling that a baseline of trust had been whipped out from under my feet, concern about the future, and intrigue and looking forward to finding out where I will end up working. There's a phrase that many make use of under such circumstances: being philosophical about it.

Now that I'm more aware of the sheer breadth of the philosophical toolkit, this phrase that could come across as being simply heedless chatter, an idiom with very little depth, now takes on a rich mantle of meaning: I want to be philosophical about it - about it all!

As for my future job, the main thing for me is that I stay in engineering (i.e., whilst I can do it, I'm not the world's most enthusiastic program manager; and I'm certainly not a sales person!), the better to stay on this niche but fascinating path along considering engineering from a philosophical perspective. It should be an interesting journey!