It happens. Most of the stuff we do these days invokes a number of disciplines. I forget sometimes that maybe ten percent of us just play with random CS domains for “fun” and that most people are coming into big problems blind, even sometimes the explorers (though having comfort with exploring random fields is a skill set unto itself).

Before the Cloud, when people would ask for a book on distributed computing, which wasn’t that often, I would tell them seriously “Practical Parallel Rendering”. That book was almost ten years old by then. 20 now. It’s ostensibly a book about CGI, but CGI is about distributed work pools, so half the book is a whirlwind tour of distributed computing and queuing theory. Once they start talking at length about raytracing, you can stop reading if CGI isn’t your thing, but that’s more than halfway through the book.

I still have to explain some of that stuff to people, and it catches them off guard because they think surely this little task is not so sophisticated as that…

I think this is where the art comes in. You can make something fiddly that takes constant supervision, so much so that you get frustrated trying to explain it to others, or you can make something where you push a button and magic comes out.