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Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

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Re: Is something bugging you?

#341

Post by amw-zero »

chinchilla2020 wrote: post #294
kretaceous wrote: post #22

This 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…

It seems like marketing copy. Not a technical blog post. It would be nice to see some actual use cases and examples. Instead, the writer just name-dropped a few big companies and claimed to have a revolutionary product that works magically. Then include the typical buzzwords like '10x programmer' and 'stealth mode'. The latter doesn't make sense because they also name-drop clients.

I'm assuming you aren't aware of FoundationDB: https://www.foundationdb.org/files/fdb-paper.pdf

Having that context puts the post in a much better perspective. It's definitely an introduction post (the company has been developing this in stealth mode for the past few years), but it is most certainly _not_ a marketing post. These people developed extremely novel testing techniques for FoundationDB and are now generalizing them to work with any containerized application.

It's a big deal.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#342

Post by nlavezzo »

shuntress wrote: post #300

> a platform that takes your software and hunts for bugs in it Ok but, what actually IS it? It seems like it is a cloud service that will run integration tests. I have to figure out how to deploy to this special environment and I still have to write those integration tests using special libraries. But even after all that integration refactoring, how is this supposed to help me find actual bugs that I wouldn't already…

I'd suggest taking a dive into the docs - there is quite a lot there that should address some of these questions.

That said, Antithesis doesn't require you to write manual tests, integration or otherwise. It requires your software system to be packaged in containers, which is fairly straightforward, and then requires a workload to be written which will emulate the normal functioning of the software system. So for example an e-commerce store would have product views, cart adds, checkouts, etc.

With this, Antithesis can start testing (running your workload, varying inputs, injecting faults, etc) the software and looking for violations of test properties. There are many (60+) test properties that come "out of the box" such as crashes, out of memory, etc. You can (and should) also define custom properties that are unique to your system, as this will surface more problems.

As your tests run, violations of test properties are reported, with lots of useful debug information included. Test runs that are particularly interesting can have a lot of extra analysis done, due to our ability to "rewind" and change inputs, get artifacts, add logging, etc.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#345

Post by jasonfarnon »

confidantlake wrote: post #291
mettamage wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in college, I've met a few people that coded _a lot_ faster than me. Typically, they started since they were 12 instead of 21 (like me). That's how 10x engineers exist, by the time they are 30, they have roughly 20 years of programming experience behind their belt instead of 10. Also, their professional experience is much greater. Sure, their initial jobs at 15 are the occassional weird gig for the uncle/a…

I am not convinced that just starting early is all there is to it. I started Math, Sports, and Piano at like 6 years old but there are still plenty of "10x " people that figuratively and literally run circles around me. Talent is a real thing.

It's possible there are plenty of individuals 10x better than you while you are 10x better than most, due to early exposure. I wouldn't say this of sports and math necessarily, but I definitely would say it of your example of piano, language acquisition, and I would not be surprised if programming patterned with them, at least partially.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#346

Post by loeg »

randomdata wrote: post #146
JimDabell wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “10x engineer” comes from the observation that there is a 10x difference in productivity between the best and the worst engineers. By saying that you want to be a 1x engineer, you’re saying you want to be the least productive engineer possible. 1x is not the average, 1x is the worst.

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…

Engineers with negative productivity are vanishingly rare, soon to be terminated, and reasonable to exclude for the purpose of the comparison.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#347

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

This is a perceptive observation. In my experience, so called "10x" engineers are as productive as they are because they have a process by which they practice the development on software that anticipates future problems. As a result when they check something in, they spend very little time "debugging" or "fixing bugs" with code that does what they already need it to do.

It is always very useful as an engineer to log your time, what are you working on "right now" and is it "new work" , "maintenance work", or "fixing work." Then for each log entry that isn't "new work" thinking about what you could have done that would have caught that problem before it was committed to the code base.

I find it is much better to evaluate engineers based on how often they are solving the same problem that they had before vs creating new stuff. That ratio, for me, is the essence of the Nx engineer (for 0.1 The point that Wilson makes that having infrastructure/tools that push that ratio further from "repair" work to "new work" is hugely empowering to an organization.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#348

Post by loeg »

wwilson wrote: post #164
randomdata wrote: post #154

Earlier 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.

Do you emit deterministic sequences from things like RDRAND? I guess you'd have to.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#350

Post by esafak »

randomdata wrote: post #203
margalabargala wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 problem here is the introduction of productivity. 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 perfor…

Measuring productivity like that in technology makes no sense because our work is not fungible; what and how we do it matters as much as how fast we do it. Time-based productivity measurement is for factory workers stamping out widgets. So in our revenue-based world, negative productivity makes sense.
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