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

incident.io

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

#281

Post by vladvasiliu »

rsanek wrote: post #137
LASR wrote: 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…

Are you using a public cloud to host the dev boxen? Is compilation actually faster than locally – assuming that your pc's having been replaced to lower-specced versions since they don't do any heavy lifting anymore?

I work for a not-really-tech company (and I'm not a full-time dev either), so I've been issued a crappy "ultra-portable" laptop with an ultra-low-voltage CPU. I've looked into offloading my dev work to an AWS instance, but was quite surprised that it wasn't any faster than doing things locally for things like Rust compiles.

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

#282

Post by Aeolun »

vb6sp6 wrote: post #266
rc_kas wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my company did this. fuck i hate it so much. if anyone wants to hire me away from this remote desktop hellscape, please do.

I've been working this way for years, really nice. What is main complaint?

Slowness, latency, lack of control. The usual suspects?

There’s moments where you try to do a thing that normal on a local PC and it’s impossible on remote. That cognitive dissonance is the worst.

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

#283

Post by 8organicbits »

hmottestad wrote: post #157
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can be plenty of friction depending on your use case.

What software are you worried about? Hackernews is a great place to share and hear if anyone has similar experiences or maybe managed to find a fix!

I work on a team that does BYO devices. Some have arm/mac, but most are on amd64/other. This forced us to make our development environment cross arch, even though our production environment is amd64/Linux only.

Some challenges included Docker images being arch specific, old Terraform modules lacking ARM support (forcing an upgrade we'd otherwise defer), and reduction in tooling we'd consider for production. We generally worry about arch specific bugs, although I don't believe we've seen any (other than complete failure to run certain tools).

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

#284

Post by randomgiy3142 »

dmos62 wrote: post #155
LASR wrote: 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.…

My dev box died (that I used for remote work), and instead of buying something new immediately, I moved my setup to a Hetzner cloud vps. Took around 2 days. Stuff like setting up termux on my tablet and the cli environment on the vps was 90 percent of that. The plus side was that I then spent the remaining summer working outside in the terrace and in the park. Was awesome. I was able to do it because practically all…

I’d be careful with Hetzner. I was doing nothing malicious and signed up. I had to submit a passport which was valid US. It got my account cancelled. I asked why and they said they couldn’t say for security reasons. They seem like an awesome service, I don’t want knock them I just simply asked if I could resubmit or something the mediate and they said no. I don’t blame them just be careful. I’m guessing my passport and face might have trigged some validation issues? I dunno.

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

#285

Post by hedgehog »

lawrjone wrote: post #2

Author here, thanks for posting! Lots of stuff in this from profiling Go compilations, building a hot-reloader, using AI to analyse the build dataset, etc. We concluded that it was worth upgrading the M1s to an M3 Pro (the max didn’t make much of a difference in our tests) but the M2s are pretty close to the M3s, so not (for us) worth upgrading. Happy to answer any questions if people have them.

I'm curious how you came to the conclusion the Max SKUs aren't much faster, the distributions in the charts make them look faster but the text below just says they look the same.

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

#286

Post by tracker1 »

LASR wrote: 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.…

Second on this. Not being able to run a solution entirely local introduces massive friction in terms of being able to reason with said solution.

When you need to have 200+ parts running to do anything, it can be hard to work in a single piece that touches a couple others.

With servers that have upwards of 128+ cores and 256+ threads, my opinion is swinging back in favor of monoliths for most software.

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

#287

Post by JonChesterfield »

If dev machine speed is important, why would you develop on a laptop?

I really like my laptop. Spend a lot of time typing into it. It's limited to a 30W or similar power budget on thermal and battery constraints. Some of that is spent on a network chip which grants access to machines with much higher power and thermal budgets.

Current employer has really scary hardware behind a VPN to run code on. Previous one ran a machine room with lots of servers. Both expected engineer laptops to be mostly thin clients. That seems obviously the right answer to me.

Thus marginally faster dev laptops don't seem very exciting.

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

#288

Post by lawrjone »

aranke wrote: post #136
lawrjone wrote: post #2

Author here, thanks for posting! Lots of stuff in this from profiling Go compilations, building a hot-reloader, using AI to analyse the build dataset, etc. We concluded that it was worth upgrading the M1s to an M3 Pro (the max didn’t make much of a difference in our tests) but the M2s are pretty close to the M3s, so not (for us) worth upgrading. Happy to answer any questions if people have them.

Hi, Thanks for the detailed analysis. I’m wondering if you factored in the cost of engineering time invested in this analysis, and how that affects the payback time (if at all). Thanks!

Author here: this probably took a 2.5 days to put together, all in.

The first day was spent hacking together a new hot reloaded but this also fixed a lot of issues we’d had with the previous loader such as restarting into stale code, which was really harming people’s productivity. That was well worth even several days of effort really!

The second day I was just messing around with OpenAI to figure out how I’d do this analysis. We’re right now building an AI assistant for our actual product so you can ask it “how many times did I get paged last year? How many were out-of-hours? Is my incident workload increasing?” Etc and I wanted an excuse to learn the tech so I could better understand that feature. So for me, well worth investing a day to learn.

Then the article itself took about 4hrs to write up. That’s worth it for us given exposure for our brand and the way it benefits us for hiring/etc.

We trust the team to make good use of their team and allowing people to do this type of work if they think it’s valuable is just an example of that. Assuming I have a £1k/day rate (I do not) we’re still only in for £2.5k, so less than a single MacBook to turn this around.

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

#290

Post by lawrjone »

eutropia wrote: post #226

To play devil’s advocate: did you see any improvement in ticket velocity, features shipped, bugs dispatched, prod events resolved - i.e. is this improvement in productivity measurable by what you judge the business by, or does it just feel better and make devs happy?

The machines haven’t arrived yet but I wouldn’t expect we’d have the data to prove this out. As you’ll know, number of tickets complete is a weak proxy for value delivered, and can be so wrong as to imply a team that you know is 2x as productive is half as much as another, or worse.

The best way (imo) to measure this is setting a threshold that we agree is bad (in our case, this is 1m+ builds) and continually measuring it so we catch when that starts to happen more frequently. And listening to devs when they say things have got slow/have become irritating.

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