Darcy L. Watkins – July 15, 2024
When swimming in a pool, if you swim along one edge, or along the perpendicular edge, you are always within arm’s reach of the edge. If you swim out away from both edges to the middle of the pool, you have nothing to grab a hold of, hence there is increased risk of drowning.
The idea here is that most hardware designs take a vendor’s reference design and then adapt it with as few changes as possible to their own custom hardware design. The idea here is that you remain close to a known working “edge”. When you customize in multiple areas at the same time, there is increased risk both from the perspective of making a mistake, and from the perspective that you may stumble upon errata, especially when dealing with bleeding edge technology.
We tend to be a bit naive, assuming that everyone knows what they are doing. With bleeding edge technology, we are inventing it. In other words we are making it all up as we go.