201–210 of 438 posts
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You come off as someone who couldn't figure out how to run certbot.
How can I write code that involves a webworker in a way that I can simulate every possible CPU scheduling between the main thread in the webworker (given they communicate via post message and no shared array buffer)? Is it possible to write such brute force test in pure JS, without having to simulate the entire computer?
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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're not wrong , but I think you may be treating something as literal math, when it is in fact idiomatic labels used to express trends.
The 10x developer originated from a study that measured performance. The 10x developer being able to do a task in a 10th of the time is quite conceivable and reflects what the study found. I'm sure we've all seen a developer take 10 hours to do a job that would take another developer just 1 hour. Nobody is doing it in negative hours, so the math works.
But performance is not the same as productivity.
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Or is. If a 1x puts in an 8 hour day, a 10x only has to put in a 48 minute day. That leaves plenty of time to read this.
That’s a bad take because you’re assuming that developer is capable of replicating that * 10
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I'm tired of hearing about 10x engineers. I just want to be a good 1x engineer. Or good at anything in life realy.
The truest 10x engineer I ever encountered was a memory firmware guy with ASIC experience who absolutely made sure to log off at 5 every day after really putting in the work. Go to guy for all parts of the codebase, even that which he didn't expressly touch.
"The truest 10x engineer I ever encountered was..."
"I love me a powerful type system, but it’s not the same as actually running your software in thousands and thousands of crazy situations you’d never dreamed of." Would not trust. Formal software verification is badly needed. Running thousands of tests means almost nothing in software world. Don't fool beginners with your test hero stories.
Good type systems (a pretty decent chunk of formal software dev) are absolutely necessary and available.
But things get tricky moving past that.
I've tried out TLA+/PlusCal, and one or more things usually happen:
1) The state space blows up and there's simply too much to simulate, so you can't run your proof.
2) With regard to race-detection, you yourself have to choose which sections of code are atomic, and which can be interleaved. Huge effort, source of errors, and fills the TLA file with noise.
3) Anything you want to run/simulate needs an implementation in TLA+. By necessity it's a cut-down version, or 'model'. But even when I'm happy to pretend all-of-Kafka is just a single linkedlist, there's still so much (bug-inviting) coding to model your critical logic in terms of your linked list.
Ironically, TLA+ is not itself typed (deliberately!). In a toy traffic light example, I once proved that cars and pedestrians wouldn't be given "greenLight" at the same time. Instead, the cars had "greenLight" and the pedestrians had "green"!
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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.
I worked for a company where I almost single handedly built a product that resulted in tens of millions of dollars in sales. I got a nice 'atta boy' for it, but my future ideas were often overridden by someone in management who 'knew better'. After the management changed, I found myself in a downsizing event once I started criticizing them for a lack of innovation.
There’s a straightforward way to reach this testing state for optimization problems. Write 2 implementations of the code, one that is simple/slow and one that is optimized. Generate random inputs and assert outputs match correctly. I’ve used this for leetcode-style problems and have never failed on correctness. It is liberating to code in systems that test like this for the exact reasons mentioned in the article.
Leet-code ends in unit-testing land, this product begins in system-testing land.
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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…
It's definitely true though that a big problem with backend is that you can't easily treat it as a whole system for test purposes.
> 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…
I'm tired of hearing about 10x engineers. I just want to be a good 1x engineer. Or good at anything in life realy.