101–110 of 364 posts
A large and increasing amount of human-made energy goes to computation, yet only a tiny proportion of software is written with energy efficiency in mind. Most programmers don't even have the tools to answer how much power their programs consume.
At a start, no compute benchmark that measures wall duration should ever be taken seriously if it doesn't also include energy consumption.
A computer and OS that boots in 100ms. Every user action gives a response in 10ms.
This is definitely not near the top of my list when I think of things that get in my way on a day-to-day basis, but I'm genuinely curious about how/why it is for you. I can't remember the last time I waited for my computer to start from a cold boot (updates apply in the middle of the night and the reboot happens then). It wakes up from sleep quick enough for me, and pretty much anything I click on or type responds fa…
Code reviews are bad, I want to be able to run the code and put breakpoints from GitHub. Having to check out the branch, install dependencies, build the code and run it only to then go back to the UI to see the changes and comments is very time consuming and being able to test suggested changes instantly would save me a ton of time. I would gladly pay for this.
If you could solve this problem, you could convince management why engineers need offices, for one.
Development environments. The amount of time and hassle I've seen lost to getting a working development environment up and running is incredible. Every time I talk to someone who's learning to program I tell them: "Setting up your development environment will be a nightmare. I have been doing this for twenty years and it's STILL a nightmare for me every time I do it. You are not alone." Docker is reasonably good here…
You could trivially create a new environment to test out someones PR or work on a feature branch, etc. If you use hosted environments, then you could connect from any client. If you only have a web browser, then you could work from VSCode in the browser (it's all JS+HTML anyway).
Others could join your hosted environment for peer-programming Google Docs style.
On hosted environments, normally long builds could be done very quickly and smart caching on the backend could share incremental compilation state between your teammates and you.
We're pretty close to this already with VSCode Remote Containers[0], Visual Studio Online[1] and VSCode Live Share[2].
(Disclosure: I work at MSFT but not on these technologies.)
[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers
>What's the most important piece of technical debt across software engineering, that could practically be solved if we put enough energy into it? Being able to update libraries, tools etc. automatically and without friction. Right now upgrading is so tedious, error prone and painful that most places just keep using ancient versions that are not only lacking bug fixes and newer features but are a huge attack surface.
Offer different versions.
Sandbox programs at the OS level to mitigate old (or new) vulns.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I envisioned something similar around the time of the 2nd gen touch phones: just plonk your phone into a dock with keyboard, mouse and monitor. I realize now it’ll probably never happen, since the companies making the phones are the same companies that make computers.
It did happen. Samsung DeX is a desktop environment that you get when you plug your tablet or phone into a screen. It's passable but of course most Android apps aren't designed for work. They also did a Linux on DeX. You could boot Ubuntu on your Samsung phone and display it via HDMI. They stopped supporting it around Android 10 though, presumably nobody ever used it.
Code reviews are bad, I want to be able to run the code and put breakpoints from GitHub. Having to check out the branch, install dependencies, build the code and run it only to then go back to the UI to see the changes and comments is very time consuming and being able to test suggested changes instantly would save me a ton of time. I would gladly pay for this.
I haven't used Collaborator in a while, but I wonder how much it has improved in ten years.
It sounds like you're thinking of a code review tool + CI/CD pipeline, right, @inglor? e.g., 1. suggest a change in the UI or backend in the code review tool 2. run CI/CD and deploy to test environment 3. refer to this new environment in the the code review tool
Am I on the right track?
I seem to spend far more time on the deployment of code than I ever used to, more time writing CloudFormation and ansible than the Java backend, python lambdas and static UI that it deploys. That seems nuts to me. I'm not sure how you fix it without being Amazon/Google. People moan about Terraform too before that gets mentioned.
I was actually just talking to a friend the other day about starting a company to solve this for fortune 500's. Nothing radical. Just a managed service provider that would build and maintain the CI/CD pipeline for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, at least on Mac, docker can be a major resource hog.
Pretty sure it just runs in a normal VM when not on linux
If you get a chance, Hyperkit can be fun to play with. I was able to write a bash script that downloads Hyperkit andba Debian ISO, and from that boot a running instance of Debian. It was an interesting exercise.