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Reading this old interview with Charles
Simonyi (who, as I recall, works across the hall from dpeck), I came across the following essential
explanation of what I do:

The knowledge of the best algorithms is the science, and the imagining of
the structure is the art.

Well, maybe not what I do, but what I’m supposed to be doing.
My current occupation is probably most isomorphic to
‘firefighting’ or ‘plumbing’. It’s repair, but it’s
not the kind of carefully-planned, deep-tissue therapy of something like seismic
retrofitting. Instead, it’s an emergency situation, a controlled panic
reaction. “Something is terribly wrong here. We have some skills, and
techniques, and just enough time to slap something together that is
some minimal epsilon better than what was already there.”