I quickly lost myself in the MIT campus. It was fun to poke my nose into classrooms and departments observing everyone busily doing their things. I must have fit right in, as two different people asked me for directions.

The talk, Why software sucks, was nearly canceled. Someone was upset about the title and it was cancelled from the seminar series. I called (ok begged) the fine folks at the student run SIPB and they came through, rescheduling the talk and hosting me on campus. Kudos to Jeff Arnold and Jennifer Tu. They had posters up all over the place (see photo above) and spread the word.

There were about 100 people in the 54-100 lecture hall (see photo). Despite the size I had lots of good questions and a good two dozen people stuck around for a long Q&A session. I was impressed with how many questions there were about process and engineering. Someone asked about why certain bugs in Word (or other v 12 software) will never be fixed: and we talked about the challenges of platforms.. how the risks for certain bits of code can become higher than the return value in making changes (a reverse econony of scale for software). Somewhere in there is a business/engineeing case study waiting to happen.