In the US, there are ways to get a software engineering license. Is it worth it? Is it it feasible?¹ No! It’s neither worth it nor feasible.

There a many ways to show a product or design meets standards and will not harm people. Engineering licensure is one of those activities in some fields. A Professional Engineering license can be given in the specialization of Electrical and Computer Engineering.² Every state follows the basic model of engineering licensure, with education, experience, and examination. This is difficult for computing professionals.

Here are the steps and why it’s difficult.

Education – IT and CS degrees are beginning to become accredited by ABET, though through their Computing Accreditation Commission. The education piece requires ABET Engineering Accreditation Commission, so many degrees do not count for the education component. Many of the best programs in our field, like Stanford or MIT, do not have this.

Experience – Four years of experience working under a licensed professional engineer is rare in industries either under the industrial exemption or under federal certification. Defense, aerospace, medical, even electrical other than power have few licensed practicing engineers. There were 13 people passing the Electrical and Computer exam in 2022.³ If you work in computing software or hardware, odds are you do not work directly for one of those 13 people.

Examination – The FE exam is so broad and difficult. And computing has moved so fast that even the foundations targeted in the PE exam are difficult to keep constant and stay relevant. Eight hour exams are always difficult.

The results could be considered underwhelming at best. The exam doesn’t prove you’re good at computing work. The requirements for education and experience aren’t a discriminating factor between other education and other experience that turn out to be just as good as what’s accepted for engineering. There’s no guaranteed or even defined career advancement or PE only work. Just a symbol of professional promise to keep doing continuing education and working ethically.

And so, against all the difficulties, and the almost no payoff, I did it. I got a PE license. And this is how.

I went to college at the University of Florida. I had chosen to graduate through the College of Engineering. And luckily the degree is ABET EAC accredited. No one is choosing computing programs based on this, and I would have happily gone to a school that did not have this feature. Choosing Computer Science or Information Technologies majors would have been a different college than engineering, and would have also worked well for me in every aspect except for this license.

Examination was very difficult. I studied a lot for the FE exam. When I took it in 2008 there was a breadth component that covered all of engineering. Topics range from structural forces to materials to circuits. The PE exam I found easier, but was still only offered once a year in 2023 due to fewer people taking the computing exam.

Experience is basically impossible. But there are exceptions depending on the state board. Alabama will consider whether your supervisor hypothetically could also apply. Washington will consider work for a federal entity or manufacturing as suitable experience (Think of Boeing and Lockheed.). Florida will use a diploma or copy of official transcripts from your supervisor only if your supervisor has a degree in engineering (Think of NASA, Northrop, and L3 Harris). I had no trouble finding PEs in my network of people I know that were willing to recommend me. But I had to rely on Florida’s industrial exemption for my supervisors. If I had lost contact or any of these supervisors were unwilling to help so much or had passed, this would not have been possible.

15 years after I took the FE exam and 4 months after sending in my application, I almost gave up when I had to request an official transcript sent for a retired supervisor who had graduated 50 years prior in another country. I was surprised the university would even do it. University of Alberta was happy to help, but they couldn’t use the newer, faster system. We waited another 3 weeks for that paperwork in the mail.

And there you have it. I can’t recommend anyone else do this. Licensure requires a lot of luck and a lot of following the rules and a lot of waiting. Each of education, experience, and examination excludes too many talented and hard working people for the software field to consider it seriously. On the positive, there are some amazing people working on this behind the scenes. People at state boards, NCEES, IEEE, ABET, and professors at engineering colleges are working hard and doing smart things. They are bringing Professional Engineering forward and making it better for all involved, and including the electronics and computing professionals along the way when they can. Software, hardware, and computing could use some more licensing, or credentialing, or product/process certification than it has today to catch up with other engineering disciplines that are entrusted with safety critical designs and verification, but licensing isn’t ready for that yet.

1. Glithero, Jason. “Can we strengthen the Professional Engineer (PE) License.” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-we-strengthen-professional-engineer-pe-license-glithero-p-e-/ ↩︎
2. Musselman, Craig, et al. “A Primer on Engineering Licensure in the United States.” https://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/blog/ASEE-A-Primer-on-Engineering-Licensure-in-the-United-States.pdf ↩︎
3. NCEES. “Squared.” 2023. https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Squared-2023_web-1.pdf ↩︎

There are programmers who have never used C before! This is a shocking fact to me, as C is where I started programming. And there are many programmers who want to learn to use C, but already know how to program. C for Beginners is easy to find with a Google search. They need an introduction to pointers and a bit of malloc. Hopefully without mentioning things like functions, types, and how to write a conditional which would surely put a ruby, python, or java programmer to sleep.

So here it is. A few code examples with pointers. I mention tools like gcc and some flags and gdb. And there is some assembly code, as really writing C requires some computer architecture understanding.

Or here’s a document with the same goals from Stanford: Stanford CS Education Library: 102

I’m working on a advertising deliverable for a client. I need to show the differences between something like Google’s AdSense and statically delivering image content. Because of this, here is an Ad.

It’s a 250x250px ad, with backup of Jake the dog, http://www.otherroute.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ad_test.html.

This took me 3 days to get approval to get working. First day is submitting the site and Google crawls it to verify you have enough content. My first domain didn’t pass (but it’s basically just a business card). This one did. Then I placed the ad code using wordpress plugin “Easy Plugin for AdSense”. It was blank (with no way to get anything other than blank) for about 48 hours.

I’ll get rid of this later. I have no aspirations about making some glorious $0.05 or whatever small personal blogs can make.

update: Removed! It shows that I made $0.00. I thought it would make a couple more cents. It was easy to do though, and if you have a specialized enough userbase I’m sure Google is a good partner today for ads.

This week’s viral facebook post asks people to share 10 favorite or influential books with their friends. It’s a bit biased to the small sample of books I’ve actually read. And really, rather than targeted at the original goal, when I finished the list it’s just a list of books that are good and worth reading.

1. People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
The history books (and textbooks) I’ve seen before I ran into this one were all about the rulers. The nobility, the clergy, the philosophers, the scientists, the artists were all there. Zinn writes about the struggles of the common man that fought and worked.

2. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
Because adventure is FUN.

3. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
It’s an enjoyable read. The characters are interesting and their interactions are great. Though as far as plot is concerned almost nothing happens. That’s great.

4. Confederacy of Dunces
A fun and generally dislikable main character has escapades and interacts with many other interesting characters. Then you can visit the statue of the character in New Orleans.

5. Dune by Frank Herbert
Sci-fi thriller about politics and trade and sand worms. A bit of the coming-of-age challenge story thrown in too. “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer” is great to repeat as a narrative choice and in your normal life.

6. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
I saw the movie before reading the book. But hearing the lines delivered I remembered it was a book and knew it was one I wanted to read. It’s like the best parts of the movie, but goes on for page after page.

7. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
What’s a way to make Buddhism palatable to Americans? A metaphor to tuning and gasoline burning and steel of course. An academic with a shadowy antagonist and internal struggle.

8. Grapes of Wrath
A bit fiction a bit history. It’s a story about getting by in America. And not the American Dream, but the uncaring one that’ll crush you if you have no money.

9. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
I always heard this was a story about Ice-9 that could destroy the planet. It’s not. It’s about Bokononism, which is the coolest religion I’ve heard of. Its holy book begins, “All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” And it only gets better and makes more sense from there.

10. Refactoring by Martin Fowler
I wanted to put one professional oriented book here. Object oriented programming isn’t in fashion as much as a few years ago, but this is the best book on the topic. He doesn’t explain much. The book is pages of actual example after example. Each technique uses object oriented methods to alter one idea into another form. And then another technique alters it back! The idea is that figuring out which is better in your situation is up to you and your analysis of the details.

At home I have an audio receiver that has trouble with some of the local FM stations. This is important as I frequently prefer NPR to whatever reality show is on the TV airwaves. I’ve looked at buying digital FM device to get the signal, but that technology never really took off and I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t made for a vehicle. And then it hit me that rather than broadcast, all the audio I want (including podcasts and other non-live audio) is available on a unicast network as well. I just need my audio receiver to connect to the internet.

http://www.raywenderlich.com/44918/raspberry-pi-airplay-tutorial

I followed this tutorial. It is an impressive tutorial in that your grandmother could follow the steps and not get lost. If you’ve used linux before you’ll scroll through a lot of introduction to reach the package names to apt-get.

So now I get my audio: NPR -> Internet -> iPhone (app) -> Raspberry Pi -> HDMI -> Receiver -> speakers. The digital signal is much clearer than the FM I was using.

Note that I’m using HDMI. The analog audio out on the Raspberry Pi isn’t recommended. I’ve tried using it before, and it just isn’t that good. They saved on the design by not including a real analog output but simulating one, which is good for alert noises or some other applications, but for music or even news leaves a lot to be desired. Options include either using HDMI so the digital to analog happens on your TV or receiver that has better electronics or a USB audio output can achieve similar results.

Publishers do make money off used game sales. Not directly, but easy to see if you analyze the system.

Person A buys a game new (ex. $50), plays it, sells it to a used game broker, let’s say GameStop (ex. $20).
Person B buys the used game from GameStop (ex. $40), part of this purchase goes to the broker for facilitating the transaction, part goes to subsidize the original purchase price (the $20 Person A received when selling the game comes from this purchase).

So Person A effectively purchased the game for less money. The lower price for Person A either allows him to purchase the game in the first place (was his perceived utility of the game between $30 and $50?), or leaves leftover money for the purchase of another game (this is his hobby, so more money may end up with game publishers).

So through the secondary market, Persons A and B share the cost. If, as the your hypothetical publisher who doesn’t “make any money off used game sales” argues, Persons A and B would both have bought the game for $50 each, giving them earnings of $100, then the game could have been priced closer to that $100 knowing the secondary market would allow for the cost sharing (let’s say MSRP of $80, giving the broker a $20 piece of the $100 pie). If it wouldn’t have sold for $80 to $100, then both A and B weren’t interested enough to each pay $50, were they?

To put cost sharing another way, my brothers and I would buy a bunch of video games when we were young. The money came from allowance and mowing lawns. To get a $50 game we’d all throw in money and we’d all play the game. If we all had to pay $50 we’d have bought a lot less games, because there wasn’t enough allowance and lawns to mow to get that kind of cash and some games just weren’t worth that much. So is the game studio and publisher losing money? Or are they making even more money? Does it just change the way the industry must operate and market their product?

Here’s the fun question: If cost sharing and a used market didn’t exist, what would the MSRP of a game be? I’d wager less than it is today.