I love finding examples of the world paralleling concepts I learn about from computers.
Lanes
Here’s one I just realized while driving the other day: lanes are great illustrations of abstraction at work. Yes, it’s possibly more efficient to let cars run freely and pack in as many cars will fit on the road, but someone realized a while ago that it’s a lot easier if we just demarcate lanes for cars to be in. We’ve abstracted away a lot of what each individual driver has to worry about. Now they just have to drive straight in their lane, and to move laterally, just see if there’s an opening in the lane next to them.
(Speaking of parallels: just like we discovered computing before discovering OOP, it also took us a while to discover lane markings after we had automobiles.)
Last Mile
Another interesting parallel has to do with the last mile problem. CDNs have figured out that they can actually beat the “regular” internet by shipping packets through their “first-class” channels, taking advantage of their already existing infrastructure. For the final leg of the delivery, they just dump the data back onto the regular network and it go from there.
FedEx has also figured this out and calls it SmartPost. By skipping over the USPS’s intermediate nodes, FedEx can get your package delivered quickly without having to burden their last mile resources.
Lens
Of course, I’m approaching all this a little backward. It’s probably just a cosmic truth that these are universally good design principles (the “last mile” Wikipedia article cites a ton of examples in nature) and I’m just viewing this through a computer scientist’s lens because that’s what I’ve been doing the last few years of my life. And I’m OK with that.
