Disclaimer: This series reflects my personal opinions and experiences. It does not represent the views of my employers, past or present, nor does it contain proprietary information.
After a two-month hiatus from this series for some much-needed perspective, and perhaps a therapeutic jolt from our Focus Restoration Device™, it’s time to conclude. The journey through paradoxes, antifragility, and inevitable decay has led to a single, distilled idea that defines my approach to this work.
Engineering compliant medical software is an exercise in managed failure.
This is the unresolvable paradox at the heart of our field. Regulators demand a deterministic crystal, while patients live in a chaotic reality that requires fluid adaptation. We are the diplomats building fragile treaties between these worlds. Our Focus Restoration Device™ revealed this truth when its logic was repurposed for manga-reading, leveraging quantum superposition, a leap of human ingenuity no validation could ever anticipate.
From this conflict arises a mindset of medical software engineering, rather than prevention. Architecture becomes less about organizing features and more about managing entropy gradients: designing for the inevitable complexity with a pure core protected by chaos-absorbing shells.
This acceptance of a high-entropy complex future state redefines quality. We no longer test only to prove correctness, but to discover limitations: a failed test is not a bug, but rather knowledge to manage unexpected future complexity better. Antifragility becomes our highest virtue as we build systems that don’t just survive the storm but feast on its energy.
Ultimately, this entire approach serves the one constant in the equation: the human. Our codebase will become fossils and our architectures will decay, but the exhausted nurse at 3 AM remains. We aren’t building immortal monuments; we are building temporary, purposeful scaffolding to support people when it matters most. This is the core of the Entropy Warrior’s creed: our work is to choreograph failure, ensuring it happens with grace and safety - and this, paradoxically, delivers the most durable and compliant software in the healthcare space.
The Focus Restoration Device™ was a fiction, but this truth is not. We fight the unwinnable war against entropy because the struggle to impose a fragile, humane order on a chaotic universe is the very soul of engineering.
Previous: Part 5 - The Evolution Trap: Why Medical Software Becomes Unmaintainable
This marks the end of the SaMD series. Thank you for joining the journey.