Building Universes from Code: Why Reality Pushes Back

Rachel Barton
Dec 10, 2025
2 min read

Updated: Dec 15, 2025

Series: The Journey from Code to Hardware - Part 2

The Journey from Code to Hardware - Part 2

In the sanctuary of a development environment, algorithms behave like celestial equations - elegant, precise, and unbothered by the frictions of reality.

But hardware has its own quiet personality. It is not a passive canvas for ideas; it reacts, resists, and reveals flaws the simulation never had to consider.

And so, when code leaves the safety of abstraction, it encounters a landscape shaped not by logic, but by physics.

A voltage fluctuates by a fraction of a percent. A component heats by a few degrees. A timer that should tick in perfect intervals drifts just enough to matter.

Suddenly, a loop designed to run in 2 milliseconds takes 3. A buffer that should remain stable fills unexpectedly. An interrupt that should fire instantly hesitates for a moment that feels insignificant - but isn’t.

These are not bugs in the traditional sense. Nothing dramatic is “failing.” Rather, the physical world is expressing itself, making its presence known through tiny inconsistencies that become enormous at scale.

This is why bringing code to life on hardware so often feels harder than writing the code itself. You’re not just building logic - you’re building logic that can survive contact with reality.

And so the role of the engineer shifts:

from author to interpreter,

from designer to negotiator,

from architect of behaviour to mediator between intention and constraints.

In our final post, we’ll explore how harmony is eventually achieved - how software and hardware learn to coexist as two halves of the same universe.