A Vacancy Has Been Detected

Kelly Sutton has written a heartbreaking piece about empathy in software design that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about for the past couple of days:

There might be no reason to build the concept of “grief” into a dorm room assignment system. It likely wasn’t financially viable. It definitely was an edge case.

This is also a story of cosmic indifference. There are an intractable number of situations that a poor dorm room system might be subject to. The death of a student is just one.