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When I read the announcement, I thought they were donating the use of CodeGuru to projects (which I presumed would be limited to open source ones) to (1) improv

When I read the announcement, I thought they were donating the use of CodeGuru to projects (which I presumed would be limited to open source ones) to (1) improve the code hygiene of the world (2) gather more data for their machine learning models (3) publicity for CodeGuru But as best I can tell, this is the worst of all worlds: I have to already have an AWS account to both create the competition and also to point CodeGuru at the repos, then I have to pay for running CodeGuru on any potential PRs, but then also separately create a BugSnag account seemingly just for this stunt. And in the end I ... get Internet points on my BugSnag account? I fail to see how anyone but AWS benefits from this, unless a participant happens to be one of the top competitors who accumulated enough Internet points to get a free trip to re:Invent

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
Quite frankly I've never seen people use AWS offerings for CI pipelines, I wonder if other products (Code* family) are any good - can anyone comment on them? I've only used CodeCommit once during a hackathon, and it seemed rather basic.
- mercora 5y ago
  CodeDeploy fails in horrible ways and the maintainers are somewhat unresponsive. I don't use it anymore but am still subscribed to some issues which apparently weren't fixed for years...
- calpaterson 5y ago
  I have. Their offerings are even less impressive than many of the popular SaaS CI servers, which themselves are usually (and incredibly!) inferior to Jenkins - except they maintain themselves due to all the cloud whatnot
- timvdalen 5y ago
  From my experience the products work fine, but they much more complex than they need to be (and than competing products are). They have a lot of weird constraints that make it hard to be really productive. That said, when you've setup a build/pipeline, it mostly just works as it should.
- Aboh33 5y ago
  I have used CodeDeploy/Codepipeline/Codebuild over several years. Overall they work well but there can be edge cases or gotchas that show up on occasion depending what you are trying to do. I also prefer externalizing the CI/CD process with Jenkins or Spinnaker-based setups.
- dingosity 5y ago
  I'm going to chime in and say the only benefit we got from CodeDeploy was its cost was folded into our AWS account. We didn't have to go through the hassle of explaining why we need "yet another <$100/month expense" from a different company. I appreciate this is a bad reason to recommend a service, and am not defending it. Just explaining why we wound up using it. The service itself is not horrible, but like every other AWS service, I felt like I was definitely not in the target market: some easily implemented feature was left out and the configuration space easily allowed you to specify things that weren't covered in the (very) thin documentation and seemed to behave unexpectedly.
  - ec109685 5y ago
    Many SaaS companies offer the ability to pay for themselves via the AWS marketplace so you can have everything under one EDP / bill (though AWS takes a little cut in this case).
- slownews45 5y ago
  Unfortunately surprisingly poor in quality! You can get much better results almost anywhere else.
pokoleo 5y ago
I think you mean BugBust, not BugSnag.
- mdaniel 5y ago
  Yes, sorry, I was on my phone :-(
jedberg 5y ago
The companies that put up the contest benefits. For a lot of people at a lot of companies, a trip to re:invent is a huge prize. If your job is to fix bugs anyway, now your company just incentivized you to do it more and in your off time to win that prize. Also, the bug buster benefits if they get up high on the leaderboard, because job recruiters will most likely use the leaderboard for lead gen. If you're looking to make a job move, moving up on the leaderboard will help.
- theli0nheart 5y ago
  > Also, the bug buster benefits if they get up high on the leaderboard, because job recruiters will most likely use the leaderboard for lead gen. If you're looking to make a job move, moving up on the leaderboard will help. I already get plenty of recruiting inbound without having to donate my time to fix bugs for Internet Points. What you're saying is that this is a worthy use of time for people because they'll maybe move up in the leaderboards which then might lead recruiters to reach out to them. And after all that, you have to do a phone screen, technical phone interview, a full-day onsite, plus whatever other hoops you'll be made to jump through to change jobs. Yeah, no. Hard pass. Seems like a huge waste of developers' time.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    > I already get plenty of recruiting inbound without having to donate my time to fix bugs for Internet Points. You're not the target audience. And also, you wouldn't be donating your time. The whole point is that a company puts up a contest for their own employees, who are presumably getting paid to participate.
    - hnechochamber 5y ago
      the target audience are people stupid enough to work for amazon for free. Amazon, fuck you pay me.
    - bogwog 5y ago
      So by participating in this, a company is making their own employees more attractive to recruiters?
ehsankia 5y ago
One part I'm still not 100% clear about after looking at the site and even your comment. Would people be running CodeGuru against their own internal AWS code, or against existing public open source Github projects, and sending PRs separately from AWS?
- mdaniel 5y ago
  I didn't set it up beyond creating a skeleton "Event", cause I have zero interest in paying real money to kick the tires on this, but as I understand it one would add existing repos to their AWS Code* tooling, at which point machine learning awesomeness takes place and it surfaces findings (inside those AWS CodeWhatever APIs, having nothing to do with BugBust) If those findings are imported into a BugBust Event [which is defined by the tuple of (start date, end date, scoring, and repos in scope)], then one can (invite|publish) a link to the BugBust Event and at the end date the participant who fixed the in-scope issues with the highest point values claims the cited prizes. Further (again, AIUI), at the end of the *AWS* event, the BugBust account who has the most *overall* points wins a re:Invent trip I don't believe AWS gets into the business of monitoring the PRs, only observing the CodeWhatever outcomes -- if CodeWhatever found an issue, time elapses, and the CodeWhatever sees the issue is fixed, then BugBust will look up the category of said issue, multiply it by the assigned score in any Events it is associated to, and award the Internet points to any Event participant it knows about
ransom1538 5y ago
Work for us for free! If we like the fix you made MAYBE we will pay you! Yay!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago

Quite frankly I've never seen people use AWS offerings for CI pipelines, I wonder if other products (Code* family) are any good - can anyone comment on them? I've only used CodeCommit once during a hackathon, and it seemed rather basic.

mercora 5y ago
CodeDeploy fails in horrible ways and the maintainers are somewhat unresponsive. I don't use it anymore but am still subscribed to some issues which apparently weren't fixed for years...
calpaterson 5y ago
I have. Their offerings are even less impressive than many of the popular SaaS CI servers, which themselves are usually (and incredibly!) inferior to Jenkins - except they maintain themselves due to all the cloud whatnot
timvdalen 5y ago
From my experience the products work fine, but they much more complex than they need to be (and than competing products are). They have a lot of weird constraints that make it hard to be really productive. That said, when you've setup a build/pipeline, it mostly just works as it should.
Aboh33 5y ago
I have used CodeDeploy/Codepipeline/Codebuild over several years. Overall they work well but there can be edge cases or gotchas that show up on occasion depending what you are trying to do. I also prefer externalizing the CI/CD process with Jenkins or Spinnaker-based setups.
dingosity 5y ago
I'm going to chime in and say the only benefit we got from CodeDeploy was its cost was folded into our AWS account. We didn't have to go through the hassle of explaining why we need "yet another <$100/month expense" from a different company. I appreciate this is a bad reason to recommend a service, and am not defending it. Just explaining why we wound up using it. The service itself is not horrible, but like every other AWS service, I felt like I was definitely not in the target market: some easily implemented feature was left out and the configuration space easily allowed you to specify things that weren't covered in the (very) thin documentation and seemed to behave unexpectedly.
- ec109685 5y ago
  Many SaaS companies offer the ability to pay for themselves via the AWS marketplace so you can have everything under one EDP / bill (though AWS takes a little cut in this case).
slownews45 5y ago
Unfortunately surprisingly poor in quality! You can get much better results almost anywhere else.

pokoleo 5y ago

I think you mean BugBust, not BugSnag.

mdaniel 5y ago
Yes, sorry, I was on my phone :-(

jedberg 5y ago

The companies that put up the contest benefits. For a lot of people at a lot of companies, a trip to re:invent is a huge prize. If your job is to fix bugs anyway, now your company just incentivized you to do it more and in your off time to win that prize. Also, the bug buster benefits if they get up high on the leaderboard, because job recruiters will most likely use the leaderboard for lead gen. If you're looking to make a job move, moving up on the leaderboard will help.

theli0nheart 5y ago
> Also, the bug buster benefits if they get up high on the leaderboard, because job recruiters will most likely use the leaderboard for lead gen. If you're looking to make a job move, moving up on the leaderboard will help. I already get plenty of recruiting inbound without having to donate my time to fix bugs for Internet Points. What you're saying is that this is a worthy use of time for people because they'll maybe move up in the leaderboards which then might lead recruiters to reach out to them. And after all that, you have to do a phone screen, technical phone interview, a full-day onsite, plus whatever other hoops you'll be made to jump through to change jobs. Yeah, no. Hard pass. Seems like a huge waste of developers' time.
- jedberg 5y ago
  > I already get plenty of recruiting inbound without having to donate my time to fix bugs for Internet Points. You're not the target audience. And also, you wouldn't be donating your time. The whole point is that a company puts up a contest for their own employees, who are presumably getting paid to participate.
  - hnechochamber 5y ago
    the target audience are people stupid enough to work for amazon for free. Amazon, fuck you pay me.
  - bogwog 5y ago
    So by participating in this, a company is making their own employees more attractive to recruiters?

ehsankia 5y ago

One part I'm still not 100% clear about after looking at the site and even your comment. Would people be running CodeGuru against their own internal AWS code, or against existing public open source Github projects, and sending PRs separately from AWS?

mdaniel 5y ago
I didn't set it up beyond creating a skeleton "Event", cause I have zero interest in paying real money to kick the tires on this, but as I understand it one would add existing repos to their AWS Code* tooling, at which point machine learning awesomeness takes place and it surfaces findings (inside those AWS CodeWhatever APIs, having nothing to do with BugBust) If those findings are imported into a BugBust Event [which is defined by the tuple of (start date, end date, scoring, and repos in scope)], then one can (invite|publish) a link to the BugBust Event and at the end date the participant who fixed the in-scope issues with the highest point values claims the cited prizes. Further (again, AIUI), at the end of the *AWS* event, the BugBust account who has the most *overall* points wins a re:Invent trip I don't believe AWS gets into the business of monitoring the PRs, only observing the CodeWhatever outcomes -- if CodeWhatever found an issue, time elapses, and the CodeWhatever sees the issue is fixed, then BugBust will look up the category of said issue, multiply it by the assigned score in any Events it is associated to, and award the Internet points to any Event participant it knows about

ransom1538 5y ago

Work for us for free! If we like the fix you made MAYBE we will pay you! Yay!