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Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

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Re: Is something bugging you?

#261

Post by EasyMark »

wwilson wrote: post #95
foobarqux wrote: post #73

Earlier 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…

thanks, I'll dig in. I'm a very visual person and charts/diagrams/flows always help my grasp of something more than a wall of text. Maybe include some of those in there when you get the time?

Re: Is something bugging you?

#263

Post by ponector »

giantg2 wrote: post #92
jimbokun wrote: post #35

> 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.

Once you have few years of experience, you don't need to be 10x to have success. You can be a reliable 1.3x, a little bit better then your teammates.

In the end it doesn't matter, whole team could be laid off at once.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#264

Post by hyperthesis »

jimbokun wrote: post #35

> 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've always thought a x10 is one who sits back and sees a simpler way - like some math problems have an easy solution, if you can see it. Also: change the question; change the context (Alan Kay)

(And absolutely not brute-force grinding themselves away)

Re: Is something bugging you?

#265

Post by bedobi »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #260
jimbokun wrote: post #35

> 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…

> People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to be possible, which then gives amazing leverage to deliver working software in a fraction of the time. I agree with the first part of your statement, but what really happens to such people? In my experience (sample size greater than one), they receive some kudos, but remain underpaid, never promoted, and are given more work under tight d…

> In my experience (sample size greater than one), they receive some kudos, but remain underpaid, never promoted, and are given more work under tight deadlines. At least until some of them are laid off along with lower performers.

100% agree, I've seen plenty of the best of the best get treated like trash and laid off at first sight of trouble on the horizon

Re: Is something bugging you?

#266

Post by tomsthumb »

loeg wrote: post #135
giantg2 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tired of hearing about 10x engineers. I just want to be a good 1x engineer. Or good at anything in life realy.

Spend less time on HN and you might get more done.

Do you want to read hacker news or be hacker news?

Re: Is something bugging you?

#268

Post by ianmcgowan »

mjevans wrote: post #259
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the "Parable of the Two Programmers." [1] A story about what happens to a brilliant developer given an identical task to a mediocre developer. [1] I preserved a copy of it on my (no-advertising or monetization) blog here: https://realmensch.org/2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-pro...

I can't seem to find it in a google search, maybe I'm just recalling entirely the wrong terms. In the early computing era there was a competition. Something like take some input and produce an output. One programmer made a large program in (IIRC) Fortran with complex specifications documentation etc. The other used shell pipes, sort, and a small handful or two of other programs in a pipeline to accomplish the same ta…

Sounds like "Knuth vs McIlroy", which has been discussed on hn and elsewhere before, and the general take is that it was somewhat unfair to Knuth.

[1] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/BentleyEtAl8... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=knuth+vs+mcilroy

Re: Is something bugging you?

#269

Post by ajb »

I'm sure I've heard of something similar being built, but specific to the JVM (ie, a specialised JVM that tests your code by choosing the most hostile thread switching points). Unfortunately that was mentioned to me at least 10 years ago, and I can't find it.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#270

Post by nlavezzo »

schaum wrote: post #257

that sounds like "automated advanced chaos monkey" to me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering#Chaos_Monkey

Depends on how far you mean with "advanced" here. We specifically cover the differences between Antithesis and Chaos Engineering in our "How It's Different" page:

https://antithesis.com/product/how_is_antithesis_different/

Here's the relevant text though:

Antithesis testing resembles chaos testing, in that it injects faults to trigger and identify problems. But Antithesis runs these tests in a fully deterministic simulated environment, rather than in production. This means Antithesis testing never risks real-world downtime. This in turn allows for much more aggressive fault injection, which finds more bugs, and finds them faster. Antithesis can also test new builds before they roll out to production, meaning you find the bugs before your customer does.

Finally, Antithesis can perfectly reproduce any problem it finds, enabling quick debugging. While chaos testing can discover problems in production, it is then unable to replicate them, because the real world is not deterministic.

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