What we want out of software

The best software engineers are endlessly curious about how things work in a way that can bewilder other brain orientations. Once upon a time I attended a DEFCON talk given by an engineer who found three old wireless routers of unknown provenance, and he decided he wanted to figure out how they worked. He could tell the chips had 14 16-bit registers (similar to an 8086 chip), and he was able to…