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>In other words, things that great engineers need to care about :) Really ? I feel like most cutting edge engineering is done in building distributed systems,

>In other words, things that great engineers need to care about :) Really ? I feel like most cutting edge engineering is done in building distributed systems, ML, high performance computing, etc. Micro optimization is where it was last century.

quickben 10y ago
That is just what gets most advertisement time these days. It sells well as a news item. AI, ML, self driving cars. But, when you have to ship 50k IOT devices and they have to be under $20. Your bosses will squeeze you for every ounce of optimization.
- rubber_duck 10y ago
  >But, when you have to ship 50k IOT devices and they have to be under $20. You're working on couple M $ project total ? Meanwhile a guy shaving off a % off performance in a FB data center saves them millions a year in power consumption alone.
  - quickben 10y ago
    I don't see us in disagreement then. I took the IOT one as illustration. But even the current project, isn't that big, and they do want properly done job.
    - rubber_duck 10y ago
      But FB guys don't micro optimize (they use PHP FFS), they measure production systems and look for bottlenecks. Premature optimization is a gut feeling based guessing game not quality engineering.
      - bertr4nd 10y ago
        FB engineer here; worked on HHVM for several years. We absolutely do "micro-optimize", e.g., our string hashing code is written in hand-tuned assembly. Where we apply those optimizations is, of course, driven by profiling, so those statements aren't entirely in conflict.
        rubber_duck 10y ago
        Well they are in the context - the article talks about premature optimization - and the OP argues you should micro optimize to be a good engineer. What I'm saying is the only way to do optimization correctly is by doing the things you and everyone else is doing when it matters - measure before and after - the rest is just assumptions that rarely pan out the way you expect them to - at least that's my experience with optimization when I was still doing game dev. You can really do micro optimization up-front

quickben 10y ago

That is just what gets most advertisement time these days. It sells well as a news item. AI, ML, self driving cars. But, when you have to ship 50k IOT devices and they have to be under $20. Your bosses will squeeze you for every ounce of optimization.

rubber_duck 10y ago
>But, when you have to ship 50k IOT devices and they have to be under $20. You're working on couple M $ project total ? Meanwhile a guy shaving off a % off performance in a FB data center saves them millions a year in power consumption alone.
- quickben 10y ago
  I don't see us in disagreement then. I took the IOT one as illustration. But even the current project, isn't that big, and they do want properly done job.
  - rubber_duck 10y ago
    But FB guys don't micro optimize (they use PHP FFS), they measure production systems and look for bottlenecks. Premature optimization is a gut feeling based guessing game not quality engineering.
    - bertr4nd 10y ago
      FB engineer here; worked on HHVM for several years. We absolutely do "micro-optimize", e.g., our string hashing code is written in hand-tuned assembly. Where we apply those optimizations is, of course, driven by profiling, so those statements aren't entirely in conflict.
      - rubber_duck 10y ago
        Well they are in the context - the article talks about premature optimization - and the OP argues you should micro optimize to be a good engineer. What I'm saying is the only way to do optimization correctly is by doing the things you and everyone else is doing when it matters - measure before and after - the rest is just assumptions that rarely pan out the way you expect them to - at least that's my experience with optimization when I was still doing game dev. You can really do micro optimization up-front