How I Under-Engineered my Book

To write my hard sci-fi novel, I wrote a cross-platform Markdown editor so that I could use interpolated variables along with R code:

https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

Uses ConTeXt to produce PDF files. I also developed a few calculators to help confirm physics and other plot-related aspects:

https://autonoma.ca/calculators/

And I'm doing it in LaTeX so I have templates doing some work.

But it's sure nice to just be able to type `make` and see a pdf pop out and green unit tests on the code 3-4 minutes later.

(I have also standardized TODO things to make them easily searchable and show up in a distinctive style in the manuscript).

Wikipedia's introductory paragraph to the subject includes the following sentence:

> Engineering involves balancing competing demands such as safety, performance, aesthetics, cost, laws and regulations, and time, while operating within fundamental limits such as the laws of physics.

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering)

I realize the word is overloaded now and that people are confusing writing programs and other cerebral pursuits with engineering, but that doesn't change its original definition.