"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."

A little while ago I discovered this wonderful quote by Henry Peteroski:This observation has been a great source of employment for me over the last two decades. In this series of blog posts I will try and share some of the techniques I've learned for getting the most out of our underlying hardware. The name "Mechanical Sympathy" comes from the great racing driver Jackie Stewart, who was a 3 times world Formula 1 champion. He believed the best drivers had enough understanding of how a machine worked so they could work in harmony with it.Why does the software we use today not feel any faster than the DOS based applications we used 20 years ago??? It does not have to be this way. As a software developer I want to try and produce software which does justice to the wonderful achievements of our hardware friends.