Talk about bad writing. If I don't know what the hell your thing is in the first paragraph, I'm not going to read your whole blog post to find out. Homepage is just as bad.
Is something bugging you?
71–80 of 438 posts
Re: Is something bugging you?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your definition is also vague. Someone still needs to do the legwork. One man armies who can do everything themselves don't really fit in standardized teams where everything is compartmentalized and work divided and spread out. They work best on their own projects with nobody else in their way, no colleagues, no managers, but that's not most jobs. Once you're part of a team, you can't do too much work yourself no mat…
That rings true and is probably why the 10x engineers I have seen usually work on devops or modify the framework the other devs are using in some way. For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved.
> For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved.
Yeah but this isn't something scalable that can happen regularly as part of your job description. Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis. It's usually a one time thing. And one time things don't usually make you a 10x dev. Maybe you just got lucky once to see something others missed.
And often times at big places most people know where the low hanging fruits are and can fix them, but management, release schedules and tech debt are perpetually in the way.
IMHO what makes you a 10x dev is you always know how to unblock people no matter the issue so that the project is constantly smooth saling, not chasing orders of magnitude improvements unicorns.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#73This might be the best introduction post I've read. Lays the foundation (get it?) for who the people are and what they've built. Then explains how the current thing they are building is a result of the previous thing. It feels that they actually want this problem solved for everyone because they have experienced how good the solution feels. Then tells us about the teams (pretty big names with complex systems) that ha…
Except it doesn't actually explain in what it does: Is it fuzzing? Do you supply your own test cases? Is it testing hardware non-determinism?
Re: Is something bugging you?
#74This might be the best introduction post I've read. Lays the foundation (get it?) for who the people are and what they've built. Then explains how the current thing they are building is a result of the previous thing. It feels that they actually want this problem solved for everyone because they have experienced how good the solution feels. Then tells us about the teams (pretty big names with complex systems) that ha…
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Re: Is something bugging you?
#75I'm trying to avoid diving into the hype cycle about this immediately - but this sounds like the holy grail right? Use your existing application as-is (assuming it's containerized), and simply check properties on it? The blocker in doing that has always been the foundations of our machines: non-deterministic CPUs and operating systems. Re-building an entire vertical computing stack is practically impossible, so they…
Does it even need to be containerized? According to the post, it sounds like Antithesis is a solution at the hypervisor layer.
Yes it looks like containerization is required: https://antithesis.com/docs/getting_started/setup.html#conta...
Re: Is something bugging you?
#76I've been super interested in this field since finding out about it from the `sled` simulation guide [0] (which outlines how FoundationDB does what they do). Currently bringing a similar kind of testing in to our workplace by writing our services to run on top of `madsim` [1]. This lets us continue writing async/await-style services in tokio but then (in tests) replace them with a deterministic executor that patches…
> Dealing with every possible source of non-determinism, re-writing services to be testable/sans-IO [2], etc. takes a lot of engineering effort. Are there public examples of what such a re-write looks like? Also, are you working at a rust shop that's developing this way? Final Note, TigerBeetle is another product that was written this way.
TigerBeetle is actually another customer of ours. You might ask why, given that they have their own, very sophisticated simulation testing. The answer is that they're so fanatical about correctness, they wanted a "red team" for their own fault simulator, in case a bug in their tests might hide a bug in their database!
I gotta say, that is some next-level commitment to writing a good database.
Disclosure: Antithesis co-founder here.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
That rings true and is probably why the 10x engineers I have seen usually work on devops or modify the framework the other devs are using in some way. For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved.
> For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved. Yeah but this isn't something scalable that can happen regularly as part of your job description. Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis. It's usually…
Does anyone else feel like people follow these sort of industry pop-culture terms a bit too intensely? What I mean is that the existence of the term tends to bring out people trying to figure who that might be, as if it has to be 100% true.
I personally think that some people can provide “10x” (arbitrary) the value on occasion, like the low hanging fruit you said. I also believe some people are slightly more skilled than others, and get more results out of their work. That said, there are so many ways for somebody to have an impact that doesn’t have to immediate, that I find the term itself too prevalent.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#78This is really exciting. I am an absolute beginner at TLA+ but I really like this possible design space. I have an idea for a package manager that combines type system with this style of deterministic testing and state space exploration. Imagine knowing that your invocation of package-manager install Will always work because file system and OS state are part of the deterministic model. or an next gen Helm with type s…
Coincidence, I'm reading this and thinking about test harnesses for my package manager idea, which is really just a thin wrapper around nix, designed under the assumption that the network might partition at any moment: keep the data nearest where it's needed, refer by hash not by name, gossip metadata necessary to find the hash for you, no single points of failure.
Tell me more about yours?
Re: Is something bugging you?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
That rings true and is probably why the 10x engineers I have seen usually work on devops or modify the framework the other devs are using in some way. For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved.
> For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved. Yeah but this isn't something scalable that can happen regularly as part of your job description. Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis. It's usually…
It really does depend on where you work. The order of magnitude improvements I'm describing involved interdisciplinary expertise involving both bespoke distributed build systems and assembly language. They're not unicorns, they do exist, but they are very rare and most engineers just aren't going to be able to find them, even with infinite time. Hence why a 10x engineer is so valuable and not everyone can be one. I myself am certainly not one, in most contexts.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#80interesting, this kind of responsive environment is dear but rare
i can't recall the last time i went to a place and people even considered investing in such setups
i assume that except for hard problems and teams seeking challenges, most people will revert to the mean and refuse any kind of infrastructure work because it's mentally more comfortable piling features and fixing bugs later
ps: i wish there was a meetup of teams like this, or even job boards :)