tldr can i guess it was doing some extra network roundtrips or something?
A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
21–30 of 256 posts
Re: A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article: > We found that setting the refspec option during git fetch reduced our build times by 99%. Seems pretty clear to me that build times were reduced by 99% as a result of cutting the git fetch times significantly (but exacyt number is not give). The headline looks correct to me.
FTA: "This simple one line change reduced our clone times by 99% and significantly reduced our build times as a result" Unless their build is 100% git pull time, this did not reduce build time by 99%.
Exactly. The article makes both statements in different places, and they are contradictory. Kind of gives an impression of sloppiness.
Re: A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
#23I think it takes some real humility to post this. No doubt someone will follow up with an “of course...” or “if you don’t understand the tech you use...” comment. But thank you for this. It takes a bit of courage to point out you’ve been doing something grotesquely inefficient for years and years.
They are a publicly traded company. They have a team dedicated to engineering support. A better article would include a management and hiring postmortem. It's shocking, really. Humility is nice, but competency is also nice.
People praise my git skills at work (among other things) when they come to me for git help.
My response is always the same: I've just run into these bugs more often than they.
Re: A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are a publicly traded company. They have a team dedicated to engineering support. A better article would include a management and hiring postmortem. It's shocking, really. Humility is nice, but competency is also nice.
This is neither incompetence nor surprising. Maybe you’ve only worked at large companies who have had time to optimize things for years (and even then, I see grotesque software decisions at my large company quite often). Try accepting that software is often written poorly optimized on the first pass, for good reason, and learn to celebrate the wins without needing to shame someone.
This is Pinterest. Every org I've worked at has been smaller. There's space between shame and ignoring mistakes.
The purpose of this post is not to educate. There's nothing in here that anyone can use to improve. It's just marketing.
Re: A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
#25I’ve found as an industry we’ve moved to more complex tools, but haven’t built the expertise in them to truly engineer solutions using them. I think lots of organizations could find major optimizations, but it requires really learning about the technology you’re utilizing.
The whole point of being an Agile "generalizing specialist" is that one is a mile wide and an inch deep.
Re: A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
#26When I first joined one of my previous jobs, the build process had a checkout stage where it was blowing away the git folder and checked out from scratch the whole repo every time (!). Since the build machine was reserved for that build job I simply made some changes to do git clean -dfx & git reset --hard & git checkout origin branch. It shaved off like 15 minutes of the build time, which was something like 50% of the total build time.
Re: A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
#27I think it takes some real humility to post this. No doubt someone will follow up with an “of course...” or “if you don’t understand the tech you use...” comment. But thank you for this. It takes a bit of courage to point out you’ve been doing something grotesquely inefficient for years and years.
I'd be interested to know how they came to realize what was missing. Did they read the Jenkins docs more thoroughly? Post on a mailing list? See something on StackOverflow? Hire a consultant?
Re: A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
#28I think it takes some real humility to post this. No doubt someone will follow up with an “of course...” or “if you don’t understand the tech you use...” comment. But thank you for this. It takes a bit of courage to point out you’ve been doing something grotesquely inefficient for years and years.
They are a publicly traded company. They have a team dedicated to engineering support. A better article would include a management and hiring postmortem. It's shocking, really. Humility is nice, but competency is also nice.
Fully agree, and the mindless HN downvote sheep bandwagon is in full effect.
Working at Pinterest and acting humbled by learning basic stuff on the job?
I play the world's smallest violin for how hard and stressful your work is. Poor babies.
Somebody give this engineering team a participation trophy.
Re: A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
#29I’ve found as an industry we’ve moved to more complex tools, but haven’t built the expertise in them to truly engineer solutions using them. I think lots of organizations could find major optimizations, but it requires really learning about the technology you’re utilizing.
This, this, so much this. When we build more complexity into a system, the less we understand it, similar to how development frameworks create multiple layers of abstraction to the point where the developers have no idea what actual code the framework produces, much less how to fix it.
Re: A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
#30Better title: A one-line change decreased our "git clone" times by 99%.
It's a bit misleading to use "build time" to describe this improvement, as it makes people think about build systems, compilers, header files, or cache. On the other hand, the alternative title is descriptive and helpful to all developers, not only just builders - people who simply need to clone a branch from a large repository can benefit from this tip as well.