421–430 of 438 posts
In my career I learned two powerful tools to get bug free code. Design by Contract and Randomized testing. I had to roll this by myself for each project I did. Antithesis seems to systematize it and created great tooling around it. That's Great!!! However, looking at their docs they rely on assertion failures to find bugs. I believe Antithesis has a missed opportunity here by not properly pushing for Design by Contra…
I've been super interested in this field since finding out about it from the `sled` simulation guide [0] (which outlines how FoundationDB does what they do). Currently bringing a similar kind of testing in to our workplace by writing our services to run on top of `madsim` [1]. This lets us continue writing async/await-style services in tokio but then (in tests) replace them with a deterministic executor that patches…
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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…
Yes: Programmers who start at twelve are often the 10x programmers who can really program faster than the average developer by a lot. No: It's not because they have 10 more years of experience. Read "The Mythical Man Month." That's the book that popularized the concept that some developers were 5-25x faster than others. One of the takeaways was that the speed of a developer was not correlated with experience. At all.…
Very few people both have a ton of exposure to a language and actually study the grammar and stuff as adults. If you don't learn the grammar you will still speak like a dog after living in a country for 20 years. A lot of people in an average company don't write hard things at their job, didn't read any textbooks etc. and spend loads of time in meetings etc.
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Even when they are smart enough to know, they seem to have very short memories. While I don't consider myself to be a 10x engineer; I have certainly done a number of 10x things over my career. 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…
Did you go build your own company? You totally should with a story like that.
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I know it's meant to be funny, but the number of tech people who spend zero time learning about "what's out there", are usually not the most effective developers. You won't find better solutions to existing or even new problems without an interest in industry. Maybe this particular article isn't "industry valuable fair enough", but having zero interest in refining and enhancing your craft beyond the work in front of…
Hard agree. Another flaw in his thinking: brain cycles and sub-conscious processing. I'm in the middle of a hard problem right now. I ran out of ideas, and opened HN about half an hour ago. In that time, without "trying", I've had two new ideas - one sent me back to my notes, which revealed that my original thinking was flawed; the second sent me to documentation, which suggested a new route to pursue. I'm digesting…
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Hard agree. Another flaw in his thinking: brain cycles and sub-conscious processing. I'm in the middle of a hard problem right now. I ran out of ideas, and opened HN about half an hour ago. In that time, without "trying", I've had two new ideas - one sent me back to my notes, which revealed that my original thinking was flawed; the second sent me to documentation, which suggested a new route to pursue. I'm digesting…
Not disagreeing with you, but just as a thought exercise: what if you had spent that time going for a walk outside rather than on HN?
Nah. I get what you're saying, and it's a great idea. Sometimes I do go for a walk. More often I do dishes. Those are both, however, higher-commitment, more time-consuming activities than flipping to a different window. If I remember correctly, my sticking point that day felt like a small one, and so the distraction / break I felt like I needed was correspondingly small.
> We thought about this and decided to just go all out and write a hypervisor which emulates a deterministic computer. Huh. Yes, that would work. It's in the category of obvious in hindsight. That is a very convincing sales pitch.
(And of course Permutation City is a fiction book all about emulating computers with sound properties!)
I kept cringing when I read the words “no bugs.” This is hubris in the classic style - it’s asking for a literal thunderbolt from the heavens. It may be true, but…come on. Everyone who has ever written a program has thought they were done only to find one more bug. It’s the fundamental experience of programming to asymptotically approach zero bugs but never actually get there. Again, perhaps the claim is true but it…
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Your life depends on lots of unsavory tasks.
Yes, like sewage pipe maintenance. Not data mining to figure out who to assassinate without trial. Using the “unsavory” euphemism for unethical and illegal violence is somewhat of a deception, is it not?