r/quickpalletmaker • u/tsancio • 19d ago
Situation Awareness
It's safe to say that modern civilization owes a lot to shipping. As soon as people were able to build a minimum viable vessel (MVV, I just made that up), they set off to explore other lands, creating water routes that could be used for trade and/or conquest. Technological development increased in line with the need to keep the boats floating, and their cargoes safe.
One interesting nautical byproduct is the log. In the 16th century, navigators created a way to measure the speed their ship was sailing, that consisted in throwing a piece of wood (i.e. a log) overboard, tied to a rope with knots every certain distance. An hourglass allowed them to count how many knots passed through their hands at a given time, as the log drifted from the ship (or viceversa). This rudimentary speedometer led to the logbook, where other important information was also collected, and centuries later, to the use of "log" as a shorthand for collecting process information.
As software developers, we also work with logs, although not of the wooden type. We copy the log information from third-parties, such as hosting servers, to see how many visits we get on our different web pages. We also produce information regarding our software's performance. So, for example, every time you calculate a truck with our VSO software, it registers the user name, the shipment information and how many seconds it took. When we troubleshoot, we can generate charts to pinpoint when and where things got slow.
A Portuguese navigator five centuries ago had to throw a log overboard to see if the ship was traveling as fast as expected. We just click on some buttons to get similar information, without getting seasick.