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Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

incident.io

141–150 of 432 posts

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#141
M1 is such a big difference. I bought mine two years ago and it still feels like and performs like new.

Never had even remotely similar experience to Intel laptops.

I am hoping that companies that are getting rid of their M1 stock, put them on a second hand market rather than through disposal service (where they get physically destroyed).

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#142
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a rack in my basement with a combined 96 cores and 192gb of ram (proxmox cluster), and a 13900k/64gb desktop workstation for most dev work. I usually will offload workloads to those before leveraging one of these old laptops that is usually dead battery. If I need something for "browser tasks" (I am interpreting this as cross-browser testing?) I have dedicated VMs for that. For just browsing the web, my M2 is…

> should donate Indeed. I keep around a 2015 MBP with 16GB (asked my old job's IT if I could just keep it when I left since it had already been replaced and wouldn't ever be redeployed) to supplement my Mac Mini which is my personal main computer. I sometimes use screen sharing, but mostly when I use the 2015 it's just a web browsing task. With adblocking enabled, it's 100% up to the task even with a bunch of tabs. G…

My 2018 has a brand new keyboard and battery that I replaced myself. It's certainly still a good computer all things considered... but for a software developer, someone with means to afford a more modern box, I would def go Apple Silicon.

My 2015 Retina is running Arch linux as an experiment. That was kinda fun. I used it as a main dev rig for a few weeks years ago when the 2018 battery finally kicked the bucket.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#143
post #112

I wonder why they didn't include Linux since the project they're building is Go? Most CI tools, I believe, are going to be Linux. Sure, you can explicitly select macOS in Github CI but Linux seems like it would be the better generic option? *EDIT* I guess if you needed a macOS specific build with Go you would us macOS but I would have thought you'd use Linux too. Can you build a Go project in Linux and have it run on…

Cross compilation is probably easiest in Go. If I recall you can just give it a different arch parameter and it will produce a working build for any supported platform.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#144
> All developers work with a fully fledged incident.io environment locally on their laptops: it allows for a This to me is the biggest accomplishment. I've never worked at a company (besides brief time helping out with some startups) where I have been able to run a dev/local instance of the whole company on a single machine.

There's always this thing, or that, or the other that is not accessible. There's always a gotcha.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#145
post #89

I feel like there is a correlation between fast-twitch programming muscles and technical debt. Some coding styles that are rewarded by fast compile times can be more akin to "throw it at the wall, see if it sticks" style development. Have you ever been summoned to help a junior colleague who is having a problem, and you immediately see some grievous errors, errors that give you pause. You point the first couple out,…

> I feel like there is a correlation between fast-twitch programming muscles and technical debt.

Being fast doesn't mean you do everything at maximum speed. Usain Bolt doesn't sprint everywhere he goes, but he can sprint quite fast when he needs to do so.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, agreed. I'll say I do use the M3 Max for Baldur's gate :). On LLMs, the issue is largely that memory bandwidth: M2 Ultra is 800GB/s, M3 Max is 400GB/s. Inference on larger models are simple math on what's in memory, so the performance is roughly double. Probably perf / watt suffers a little, but when you're trying to chew through 128GB of RAM and do math on all of it, you're generally maxing your thermal budget…

Ahh right, I'd seen a few comments about the memory bandwidth when it was posted on LinkedIn, specifically that the M2 was much more powerful. This makes a load of sense, thanks for explaining.

I've been considering buying a Mac specifically for LLMs, and I've come across a lot of info/misinfo on the topic of bandwidth. I see you are talking about M2 bandwidth issues that you read about on linkedin, so I wanted to expand upon that in case there is any confusion on your part or someone else who is following this comment chain.

M2 Ultra at 800 GB/s is for the mac studio only. So it's not quite apples to apples when comparing against the M3 which is currently only offered for macbooks.

M2 Max has bandwidth at 400 GB/s. This is a better comparison to the current M3 macbook line. I believe it tops out at 96GB of memory.

M3 Max has a bandwidth of either 300 GB/s or 400 GB/s depending on the cpu/gpu you choose. There is a lower line cpu/gpu w/ a max memory size of 96GB, this has a bandwidth of 300 GB/s. There is a top of the line cpu/gpu with a max memory size of 128GB, this has the same bandwidth as the previous M2 chip at 400 GB/s.

The different bandwidths depending on the M3 max configuration chosen has led to a lot of confusion on this topic, and some criticism for the complexity of trade offs for the most recent generation of macbook (number of efficiency/performance cores being another source of criticism).

Sorry if this was already clear to you, just thought it might be helpful to you or others reading the thread who have had similar questions :)

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This xkcd seems relevant also: https://xkcd.com/303/ One thing that jumps out at me is the assumption that compile time implies wasted time. The linked Martin Fowler article provides justification for this, saying that longer feedback loops provide an opportunity to get distracted or leave a flow state while ex. checking email or getting coffee. The thing is, you don't have to go work on a completely unrelated task.…

Spot on. The mind often needs time and space to breathe, especially after it's been focused and bearing down on something. We're humans, not machines. Creativity (i.e., problem solving) needs to be nurtured. It can't be force fed. More time working doesn't translate to being more effective and more productive. If that were the case then why are a disproportionate percentage of my "Oh shit! I know what to do to solve…

I love those moments. Your brain has worked on it in the background like a ‘bombe’ machine cracking the day’s enigma code. And suddenly “ding… the days code is in!”

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#148
post #137
post #90

Solid analysis. A word of warning from personal experience: I am part of a medium-sized software company (2k employees). A few years ago, we wanted to improve dev productivity. Instead of going with new laptops, we decided to explore offloading the dev stack over to AWS boxes. This turned out to be a multi-year project with a whole team of devs (~4) working on it full-time. In hindsight, the tradeoff wasn't worth it.…

This might have to do with scale. At my employer (~7k employees) we started down this path a few years ago as well, and while it has taken longer for remote to be better than local, it now definitively is and has unlocked all kinds of other stuff that wasn't possible with the local-only version. One example is working across multiple branches by switching machines instead of files on local has meant way lower latency…

Haha, as I read more words of your comment, I got more sure that we worked at the same place. Totally agree, remote devboxes are really great these days!

However, I also feel like our setup was well suited to remote-first dev anyway (eg. syncing of auto-generated files being a pain for local dev).

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#149
post #89

I feel like there is a correlation between fast-twitch programming muscles and technical debt. Some coding styles that are rewarded by fast compile times can be more akin to "throw it at the wall, see if it sticks" style development. Have you ever been summoned to help a junior colleague who is having a problem, and you immediately see some grievous errors, errors that give you pause. You point the first couple out,…

> I feel like there is a correlation between fast-twitch programming muscles and technical debt. Being fast doesn't mean you do everything at maximum speed. Usain Bolt doesn't sprint everywhere he goes, but he can sprint quite fast when he needs to do so.

saying there's a correlation is already tempering the statement. can you imagine a scenario I could be referring to? that's the one I'm talking about

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#150
Fun read, I like how overkill it is. When I was still employed, I was building our django/postgres thing locally in Docker, with 32gb of ram, and it was a wild improvement in terms of feedback loop latency over my shitty 13" intel mbp, and I think it's seriously underappreciated how important it is to keep that pretty low, or as low as is cost effective. Now that I'm not employed and don't hope to be for a while, I do think the greatest bottleneck in my overall productivity is my own discipline since I'm not compiling anything huge or using Docker. The few times I do really notice how slow it is, it's in big I/O or ram operations like indexing, or maybe the occasional xcode build, but it's still low in absolute terms and the lack of some stressful deadline doesn't have me worrying so much about it. That makes me happy in some ways, because I used to feel like I could just throw new hardware at my overall productivity and solve any issues, but I think that's true only for things that are extremely computationally expensive. Normally, I'd just spend the cash, even as a contractor, because it's investment in my tools and that's good, but the up-charge for ram and ssd is so ludicrously high that I have no idea when that upgrade will come, and the refurb older models of M1 and M2 just aren't that much lower. My battery life also sucks, but it's not $5k sucky yet. Also worth joting I'm just a measly frontend developer, but there have been scenarios in which I've been doing frontend inside either a big Docker container or a massive Tomcat java app, and for those I'd probably just go for it.
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