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Mechanical sympathy mindset

During my time in London I socialised a bit with some of the members of the team behind the LMAX Disruptor, which is where I first recall hearing of the concept of Mechanical Sympathy and its applicattion to design of software.

Something that was intially counterintuitive to me about the Disruptor was the approach to including padding in data structures to exploit caching at the hardware level.

I'm on a break from working in tech at the moment as I keep myself available to help my family adjust to some health issues that come with aging, but my mechanical sympathy mindset is still active.

Today as I was vacuuming the floor of my living room I wondered about whether height makes a difference to the suction power of the vacuum cleaner - as taller people will typically extend the length of the pipe between the suction mechanism and the floor. Based on some Google search results, the short answer is "yes".

I was going to posit that as an explanation for why my mother always seemed to do a better job of vacuuming than me when I was younger, but I wasn't taller then, so that doesn't really apply. 

 

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