Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Test your product on a crappy laptop

css-tricks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 321 posts

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#291

Post by rovr138 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #146
Gigachad wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also as a dev, I don’t really care. It’s not my money on the line, it’s the companies. If the site sucks and users don’t like it, the company loses profits and they will be forced to change. The only thing I take a stand on is when the product is actively harmful and immoral. Just being shit or slow is not my problem.

Trouble is that your users are generally in a similar situation, not getting to choose what tools they use. By producing bad software, you’re making their life harder personally.

As a dev, I don't produce bad software.

Users of the features we develop are the ones that produce bad websites.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#292

Post by Spivak »

FearlessNebula wrote: post #282
izacus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my personal experience, even getting an average web dev to touch a slower Windows machine is mission impossible. The best you can hope is "ewww, this sucks so much and it's ugly, why would anyone do this" and then arrogant walk back to their 3000$+ MacBook to shovel more JS libraries into the website. I've literally not seen a single rockstart javascripter actually willingly try to test things on Windows, much les…

I mean can you really blame them? I frequently play tech support for many of my family members running Windows 10 without an SSD and it’s like pulling teeth it’s so slow. Running Windows 10 with an SSD and 8+ GB of RAM is a different story and way better experience.

Especially since IT departments see Windows as the “budget” option for worker drones who don’t need much other than a web browser and Office.

The other side benefit is that Macs are way harder to manage and so IT depts don’t actually bother and you get admin access and told to turn on FileVault instead of the nightmare that is opinionated GPOs.

So when it comes to my option of a MacBook Pro or the cheapest functional Dell Latitude bought in bulk I’m gonna suddenly care a whole lot about testing in Safari.

Apple set themselves up really well as an escape hatch from overbearing IT, not surprised people with the opportunity take it. Devs get the treatments that was previously reserved only for the C suites.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#294

Post by tlavoie »

taeric wrote: post #245
einpoklum wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Please consider using a proper mail client: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients 2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.

Back when I could use emacs for email, I was quite happy. Unfortunately, I have the advanced protection on in my Gmail account, so I haven't figured how to get that back, yet. App passwords aren't allowed on my account. I have considered moving email accounts, but also don't have enough motivation for all that entails.

I think you can get most of the benefits of the enhanced protection but setting specific features yourself instead of the one "do everything" flag.

I have 2FA required on regular logins for example, which can be a Yubikey or authenticator app token. At the same time, I have app passwords, used by my emacs-based email setup. Mu4e gives me instant search-based access to my saved email, and pretty good security elsewhere. Is that an option?

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#296

Post by ehsankia »

cpeterso wrote: post #267
ehsankia wrote: post #39

Even more than crappy laptop, please please test your application on bad/degraded networks. So many apps completely glitch and breakdown in bad network environments.

I can't find a source, but I heard that Google used to purposely slow down their corporate network on some days to force all teams to dogfood test their software on slow networks. Or maybe they just offered an alternate slow Wi-Fi network to make testing easier, not forcing everyone to use a slow network. But forcing managers to use a slow network would be an effective way to get them to prioritize performance. If us…

Idk about the main network, but they do have a separate "Google-2g" network you can connect to that has degraded performance for testing purposes. Maybe they force people to use it when testing apps?

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#297

Post by rtpg »

rini17 wrote: post #211
rtpg wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically no desktop client works as well as the gmail web app (especially when it comes to search). I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find something. A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run, and I don’t really believe too much in the idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to police overreach. Sig…

KMail (on KDE on Linux desktop) search is instant. Pity the Akonadi framework under it needs more love to iron out its bugs. I suffer web GMail only when not at my workstation.

Yeah my problem has been fast search that just is wrong. Like even exact keyword searches.

I’m sure it’s something about my configurations but every time I mess around to figure it out it doesn’t work.

Generally my use of email is “look at stuff from right now” or “look at stuff from 6+ months ago”

(Here “wrong” means “does not find the email I am looking for”. Usually a failure mode of just not showing much of anything)

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#298

Post by kingcharles »

hu3 wrote: post #74
cable2600 wrote: post #66

I use Cheap Acers for $150 they seem to run Windows 10 slow enough to be a craptop. They also run Linux just fine because Linux has less of an overhead. In Windows 10, Acer laptops have a huge CPU time working because it struggles to keep up with the main OS.

I understand you started with "cheap" but don't generalize brands like this: > In Windows 10, Acer laptops have a huge CPU time working because it struggles to keep up with the main OS. My coleague has an Acer laptop with i9 processor, RTX 3080 and 64GB RAM running on Raid NVMEs. It's screamingly fast.

I have one I bought new for $300 on Amazon in the summer. It's my main Visual Studio development PC. I have it hooked up with a second monitor. Honestly, it runs everything perfectly under Windows 10. The only upgrade I performed was to add some extra RAM.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#299

Post by cpeterso »

ehsankia wrote: post #296
cpeterso wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find a source, but I heard that Google used to purposely slow down their corporate network on some days to force all teams to dogfood test their software on slow networks. Or maybe they just offered an alternate slow Wi-Fi network to make testing easier, not forcing everyone to use a slow network. But forcing managers to use a slow network would be an effective way to get them to prioritize performance. If us…

Idk about the main network, but they do have a separate "Google-2g" network you can connect to that has degraded performance for testing purposes. Maybe they force people to use it when testing apps?

The Google-2g network is what I must have heard about. Thanks!

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#300

Post by watersb »

alkot89 wrote: post #109
watersb wrote: post #93

Oh God yes. Back in the 20th Century, I was on a team for a major web browser. They were attempting to extend web browser technologies to crawl and cache web sites. The idea was to enable complex web experiences in a time when Internet service was analog telephone, 9600 baud. We worked for months on that. At the office. In Silicon Valley. On $6000 Compaq computers. When I returned home via my two-hour commute, I woul…

I'm sorry, but I don't understand the point you are trying to make here either with regards to the original topic or even how the second part of your story relates to the first.

My point did get muddled there in telling a story.

It's that the teams were putting all this effort using quite literally millions of dollars of tech infrastructure, to create tech products to be delivered to very limited computers and slow networks.

And the real point: the end product was never seen on the target hardware by those building the things. No clue.

The web browser company assembled a usability lab, would get volunteer people to come in and try things out. But the feedback from that group was submitted as a report to a management group that was two layers above us.

Chain the coders and designers to $350 laptops, at least one day a week.

Post reply on HN