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Software Development at 1 Hz

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Re: Software Development at 1 Hz

#21

Post by ams6110 »

This isn't relevant only for development. Applications that take 10+ seconds to process an action are annoying and tiring as well.

At work a lot of stuff is like this. Enterprisey applications that take 10, 15, 20 seconds to process each entry. Time enough to get distracted. Time enough to tab over to email or some other application and lose focus. Just overall mentally fatiguing.

Developers who are annoyed by 10 second delays in their development process should remember that their users will be just as annoyed by slow response time in applications. Cut the weight. Make it faster. I'm more and more convinced that nothing else will go as far in making users happy.

Re: Software Development at 1 Hz

#22

Post by digi_owl »

eeks wrote: post #4

A 20s turnover is not even that slow. Debugging undecidable timing issues in an FPGA may have turnover counted in hours given how slow HW synthesizers are. If the need of better tooling is clear, the OP does not mention one important point: faster machines have created some sort of fast food approach to programming, where programs are built on the go with the help of the appropriate tools (some sort of computer-aided…

Possibly. All this talk about getting antsy if things take time to build seems to fit a worry i have about our current web focused world.

Observe Google and their management of Android.

Again and again they have pushed out some half-baked X.0 version with the unstated intent that it will be sorted in a near future update. A clear example of that was the introduction of the Storage Access Framework.

This is the web mentality seeping into the development of firmware and physical products, and it is leading to a massive culture clash and crap products.

Basically you can't just code, push, run, repeat on devices in peoples pockets and bags like you can a web site.

Re: Software Development at 1 Hz

#23

Post by kuon »

I know work with phoenix + live-reload and the nearly instant dev cycle is the best thing that happened to me since I started web dev.

I know rails has something similar but I haven't worked with rails for nearly 2 years now so I can't tell.

As a side note, having a short dev loop is really good for education.

Re: Software Development at 1 Hz

#24

Post by corecoder »

From this perspective, the worst things I meet are setting up or tuning complex CI pipelines and developing infrastructure automation: a cycle can easily last more than half an hour and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to speed up things, really.

Re: Software Development at 1 Hz

#25

Post by Retr0spectrum »

corecoder wrote: post #24

From this perspective, the worst things I meet are setting up or tuning complex CI pipelines and developing infrastructure automation: a cycle can easily last more than half an hour and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to speed up things, really.

With a modular TDD approach, you could in theory test individual components very rapidly. I haven't looked into it too much, but I assume such systems exist.

Re: Software Development at 1 Hz

#26

Post by bananaboy »

agumonkey wrote: post #19
kabdib wrote: post #6

I once had - a super-fast assembler - a super-fast way to get the assembled code over to a target system ... and my turnaround time was on the order of five seconds: Edit, hit a button making the target ready to receive the code, assemble: Running. It almost didn't matter that I was writing 6502 assembly; things just fell together and it was magic . Years later I was in a place where it was common to have half-day bu…

I always laugh thinking that Turbo Pascal was so quick I didn't understand the difference between build and "build then run". And that was statically typed code on Pentium class computer.

Turbo Pascal was blazingly fast even on a 286 or 386! Such a great IDE.

Re: Software Development at 1 Hz

#27

Post by jerf »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #25
corecoder wrote: post #24

From this perspective, the worst things I meet are setting up or tuning complex CI pipelines and developing infrastructure automation: a cycle can easily last more than half an hour and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to speed up things, really.

With a modular TDD approach, you could in theory test individual components very rapidly. I haven't looked into it too much, but I assume such systems exist.

I have also often complained about this pain of CI systems.

One of the problems is that the things you need to have a proper CI system conflict with fast build times. Proper CI requires a clean checkout, and a total compile fromscratch. If you're doing something in Docker, you ought to start your Docker process from scratch. If you're in a VM, you really ought to revert to a snapshot to make sure you're not accidentally accumulating un-CI'ed state. And so on.

While in normal development you may have a very fast turnaround, a properly configured CI system needs to assume the worst, start from scratch, and build everything, in every combination you support. (You may also want a less accurate CI build that trades speed for accuracy and just does an incremental build of some particular aspect of the system. But that should be supported by the full CI I describe here.)

Consequently, something that fails only 97% into that build process, and only fails on the CI server, can be very annoying to fix. But you don't really have a choice, because any hacky alternative is too risky. A CI system that has human intervention isn't a CI system.

Re: Software Development at 1 Hz

#28

Post by justifier »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #25
corecoder wrote: post #24

From this perspective, the worst things I meet are setting up or tuning complex CI pipelines and developing infrastructure automation: a cycle can easily last more than half an hour and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to speed up things, really.

With a modular TDD approach, you could in theory test individual components very rapidly. I haven't looked into it too much, but I assume such systems exist.

similarly, when in development i'll hack around slow CI times by storing the output of the most cycle heavy steps in the CI and on subsequent runs determine if i can just use the old stored values stead running through everything

that said, i agree that there should be effort, or at least roadmap, to get CI compile times down to near native

to play devels[sic] advocate we've had lengthy compile times on systems and native apps since time immemorial, it just seems that browser work has caught up in complexity and ubiquity.. even if some of that complexity can be blamed on negligent or lazy development

Re: Software Development at 1 Hz

#29

Post by sebastianconcpt »

Today I was thinking in the idea that LISP and Smalltalk are probably at the top on instant feedback for development. And Smalltalk dev tools might rank even higher because you can dig any instance to any dept and evaluate code "talking to it" and getting instant answers right there.

Re: Software Development at 1 Hz

#30

Post by pags »

nojvek wrote: post #9

I am a huge believer of In my new team I got it from 30s to 5s and the effects have been amazing. I have to thank VScode and Gulp to make this possible. With typescript vscode does fast parsing of your code on every keystroke and gives squigglys instantly. On every save, gulp does its magic and vscode runs the problem matcher and shows more squiggly on my editor. The browser knows when a file has changed and refreshe…

Web engineers are waiting for stuff to compile these days? I thought things were supposed to be moving forward, not backward.
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