From Nuclear Engineering to Software: What Actually Transferred
Reactor thermal-hydraulics and REST APIs have more in common than you'd think
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People expect the jump from nuclear engineering to software to be a hard pivot. In practice, the instincts transferred almost directly: model the system, isolate the variables that matter, and distrust any result you can't explain.
Kriging-method optimization for a reactor's rib geometry and tuning a database index are the same exercise — search a space you can't brute-force, using a model of where the improvement likely is.
The domain changed. The way I debug a surprising result didn't.