Note last edited August 2021
Games like Factorio, Satisfactory, … can teach you concepts that are relevant in (software) engineering.
Technical debt
Logistics games teach you about tech debt
Scalability
- Designing a factory that can grow over time is not trivial.
- Designing a transportation bus that can grow (higher throughput) over time is not trivial.
Queueing theory
- Factorio comes with backpressure by default. You can get around it by adding buffers (crates), if you need that.
- Trains vs. belts: Trains are higher latency (unless they’re very far away, in which trains are lower latency) but higher throughput.
- Shared queue ensure throughput remains high.
Microservices
I found that it’s good to place multiple separate factories and connect them up (usually with trains, but you could do it with belts as well). These are comparable to microservices.
Note last edited August 2021.