So this is a valgrind for containers? "If" it works well, and doesn't flag false things, this is pretty useful.
You might want to sell this as a bug finder. But it also could be sold as a security hardening tool.
Is something bugging you?
301–310 of 438 posts
Re: Is something bugging you?
#302First reaction: "Yes, your site's weird font is bugging me!"
(Antithesis employee here.) We’re using Inter, which our designer assures me is pretty popular. But this isn’t the first time we’ve heard this complaint. Also, we had an issue in testing on a different part of our site where the font was getting computed as something weird and ugly on our development NixOS machines. Would you mind replying with what the browser console says your font is getting computed as? Thanks! E…
(It's JS blocking - I told NoScript to allow antithesis.com, and that completely changed the font in FireFox.)
Re: Is something bugging you?
#303Congratulations to the Antithesis team!
I actually interviewed with them when they were just starting, and outside of being very technically proficient, they are also a great group of folks. They flew my wife and I out to DC on what happened to be the coldest day of the year that year (we are from California) so we didn’t end up following through but I’d like to think there is an alternative me out there in the multiverse hacking away on this stuff.
I highly recommend Will’s talks (which I believe he links in the blog post):
Re: Is something bugging you?
#304Earlier 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 had an idea once but when I tried to explain it people didn't understand. I revisited earlier thought: communication is a 2 man job, one is to not make an effort to understand while the other explains things poorly. It always manages to never work out. Periodically I thought about the puzzle and was eventually able to explain it such that people thought it was brilliant ~ tho much to complex to execute. I thought a…
> Ah, this must be how someone else would have done it!
This is a good exclamation :D
And it's a poignant story. Thanks for sharing.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#305This 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…
To be fair, the line right after that is "I know, I know, that's an insane thing to say."
Re: Is something bugging you?
#306> 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…
6.5 X 15 is only 97 hours per week not even close to the 400 hrs (5X40) per week of programming a 10X Rust programmer can provide. I jest but all this 10X stuff is getting ridiculous. They stayed in "Stealth" mode because they didn't have anything worth showing for 5 years. Doesn't sound all that productive to me. More likely what they are trying to do was hard and complicated and took a while to figure out.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#307Earlier 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...
Without more backup I can only describe that as being fiction. Righteous fiction, where the good guy gets downtrodden and the bad guy wins to fuel the reader's resentment.
It's practically my life experience.
Sometimes I'm appreciated, and managers actually realize what they have when I create something for them. Frequently I accomplish borderline miracles and a manager will look at me and say, "OK, what about this other thing?"
My first job out of college, I was working for a company run by a guy who said to me, "Programmers are a dime a dozen."
He also said to me, after I quit, after his client refused to give him any more work unless he guaranteed that I was the lead developer on it, "I can't believe you quit." I simply shrugged and thought, "Maybe you shouldn't have treated me like crap, including not even matching the other offer I got."
I've also made quite a lot of money "Rescuing Small Companies From Code Disasters. (TM)" ;) Yes, that's my catch phrase. So I've seen the messes that teams often create.
The "incompetent" team code description in the story is practically prescient. I've seen the results of exactly that kind of management and team a dozen times. Things that, given the same project description, I could have created in 1/100 the code and with much more overall flexibility. I've literally thrown out entire projects like that and replaced them with the much smaller, tighter, and faster code that does more than the original project.
So all I can say is: Find better teams to work with if you think this is fiction. This resonates with me because it contains industry Truth.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
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;…
>It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does I'd be happier if industry cares more for team productivity - I have witnessed how rewarding "10x" individuals may lead to perverse results on a wider scale, a la Cobra Effect. In one insidious case, our management-enabled, long-tenured "10x" rockstar fixed all the big customer-facing bugs…
I try to look at these things through the lens of “software literacy” - software is a form of literacy and this story might be better viewed as “a bunch of illiterate managers are impressed with one good writer at the encyclopdia publishers, now it turns out this guy makes mistakes, but hey, what do you expect when the management cannot read or write !”
Re: Is something bugging you?
#309> 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…
In my experience it often comes down to business processes. We have a guy in my extended team who knows everything about his side of the company. When I work with him I accomplish business altering deliveries in a very short amount of time, which after a week or two rarely needs to be touched again unless something in the business changes. He’s not a PO and we don’t do anything too formally because it’s just him, me and another developer + whatever business manager will benefit from the development (and a few testers from their tran). In many ways the way we work these projects are very akin to Team Topologies.
At other times I’ll be assigned projects with regular POs, Architects and business employees who barely know what it is they are doing themselves, with poorly defined tasks and all sorts of bureaucratic nonsense “agile” process methods and well spend forever delivering nothing.
So sometimes I’m a 50x developer delivering business altering changes. At other times I’m a useless cog in a sea of pseudo workers. I don’t particularly care, I get paid, but if management actually knew what was going on, and how to change it… well…
Re: Is something bugging you?
#310Earlier 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…
I was both of those developers at different times, at least metaphorically.
I drank from the OO koolaid at one point. I was really into building things up using OOD and creating extensible, flexible code to accomplish everything.
And when I showed some code I'd written to my brother, he (rightly) scoffed and said that should have been 2-3 lines of shell script.
And I was enlightened. ;)
Like, I seriously rebuilt my programming philosophy practically from the ground up after that one comment. It's cool having a really smart brother, even if he's younger than me. :)