I think there is a lot of opportunity for integrating simulation into software development. I'm surprised it isn't more common though I suppose the upfront investment would scare many away.
Is something bugging you?
161–170 of 438 posts
Re: Is something bugging you?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure your math works. What we do know is that the worst engineers provide negative productivity. If 1x is the worst engineer, then let's for the sake of discussion denote x as -1 in order for the product to be negative. Except that means the 10x engineer provides -10 productivity, actually making them the worst engineer. Therein lies a conflict. What we also know is that best engineer has positive productivit…
You are arguing against the idea that there is a factor of ten difference in productivity between the best and the worst engineers. That’s fine if you want to do that, but that’s explicitly where the term “10x engineer” comes from and what defines its meaning. So if you disagree with the underlying concept, there is no way for you to use terms like “[n]x engineer” coherently since you disagree with its most fundament…
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Re: Is something bugging you?
#163> The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size. I feel like the idea of the legendary "10x" developer has been bastardized to just mean workers who work 15 hours a day 6.5 days a week to get something out the door until they burn out. But here's your real 10x (or 50x) productivity. People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to…
It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does. Too often, management will focus more on the guy who works 12 hour days to accomplish 8 hours of real work than the guy who gets the same thing accomplished in an 8 hour day. Also, deviations from 'normal' are frowned upon. Taking time to improve the process isn't built into the schedule;…
That’s because most executives can’t understand technology deeply enough to know the difference.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can force any* software to be deterministic. * Offer only good for x86-64 software that runs on Linux whose dependencies you can install locally or mock. The first two restrictions we will probably relax someday.
Aren't you just 'forcing' determinism in the inputs, relying on the software to be always deterministic for the same inputs?
Nope. We’re emulating a deterministic computer, so your software can’t act nondeterministically if it tries.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#165This is a great pitch, and I don't want to come across as negative, but I feel like a statement like "we found all bugs" can only be true with a very narrow definition of bug. The most pernicious, hard-to-find bugs that I've come across have all been around the business logic of an application, rather than it hitting into an error state. I'm thinking of the category where you have something like "a database is curren…
I think the reference to "all the bugs" here is basically that our insanely brutal deterministic testing system was not finding any more bugs after 100's of thousands of runs. Can't prove a negative obviously, but the fact that we'd gotten to that "all green" status gave us a ton of confidence to push forward in feature development, believing we were building on something solid - which, time has shown we were.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't you just 'forcing' determinism in the inputs, relying on the software to be always deterministic for the same inputs?
Nope. We’re emulating a deterministic computer, so your software can’t act nondeterministically if it tries.
Right, by emulating a deterministic computer you can ensure that the inputs to the software are always deterministic – something traditional computing environments are unable to offer for various reasons.
However, if we pretend that software was somehow able to be non-deterministic, it would be able to evade your deterministic computer. But since software is always deterministic, you just have to guarantee determinism in the inputs.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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 You and I have worked at very different organizations. Everywhere I've been has had insane levels of inefficiency in literally every process.
>insane levels of inefficiency in literally every process.
In processes yes, not in code, and solo 10x devs alone can't fix broken processes as those are a the effect of broken management and engineering culture.
People know where the inefficiencies are, but management doesn't care.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Post author here. Sorry it was vague, but there's only so much detail you can go into in a blog post aimed at general audiences. Our documentation ( https://antithesis.com/docs/ ) has a lot more info. Here's my attempt at a more complete answer: think of the story of the blind men and the elephant. There's a thing, called fuzzing, invented by security researchers. There's a thing, called property-based testing, inven…
Has any thought been given to repurposing this deterministic computer for more than just autonomous testing/fuzzing? For example, given an ability to record/snapshot the state, resumable software (i.e. durable execution)?
Re: Is something bugging you?
#169This 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…
Did you read a different article than me?
The linked article is 3/4 about some history and rationale before it actually tells you what they build.
It's like those pesky recipe blogs that tell you about the authors childhood, when you just want to make vegan pancakes.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#170Happy customer here —— maybe the first or second? Distributed systems are hard; #iykyk.
Antithesis makes them less hard (not in line an NP hard sense but still!).