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Coding Horror: Pressing the Software Turbo Button

9 points by twampss 18y ago

jobeirne 18y ago
What an utterly pointless article.
- sigh 18y ago
  No joke - totally missed the point and went off on an unrelated tangent - real broken record stuff.
dcminter 18y ago
"Developers need fast machines to be productive" Possibly. But one of the advantages of giving developers comparatively slow machines is that it gives them a personal incentive to produce fast software. Of course that's painful when bloaty IDEs come into play, but for web software I'd have to suggest using an under-specced deployment test platform to get some of this benefit.
- festivusr 18y ago
  Giving developers sub-par machines for "incentive" purposes is... well, crazy. Intentionally slowing down your write-compile-test cycle makes no sense. For web software, you indeed want your test environment to be no faster than production, so it can be slower (within reason), especially if you have a hard time simulating in test loads you expect to see in production.
  - gaius 18y ago
    Your developers should have the exact same spec machines as your users. I remember back in the day working for a company whose websites looked gorgeous on the designer's high-end Mac displays on the LAN... The average customer at the time had a 56.6k modem.
    - sigh 18y ago
      Not for development they shouldn't. For testing sure, but are you really going to justify that the development process should take at least twice as long because of poor QA?
      - gaius 18y ago
        I really question whether a fancy machine helps with productivity. Some things are obvious, like plenty of screen real estate so you can switch contexts just by flicking your eyes. But most of the tools are just gratuitous power hogs. Rational Rose, Eclipse, etc. Let's be brutally honest, modern IDEs don't do much that Energize wasn't doing perfectly well well over a decade ago, or that Emacs was doing a decade before that. I could do my job on an old SparcStation 5, and I bet everyone else could too.
        modoc 18y ago
        That's a bet you'd lose. More specifically I can't without taking a huge hit in productivity (and there are somethings I wouldn't be able to do at all on a Sparc station). In order to do my job, here's a short list of what I run on my MBP: Eclipse (explaining why Eclipse is better for my needs than emacs (which I used to use) would take a while, but lets assume I'm actually more productive with Eclipse) Parallels Linux VM running Oracle 10 XE Parallels Windows XP VM for testing with IE and IE 7, and running a couple of windows only tools I need on occasion Mail.app Adium Safari Firefox iCal iTunes TextMate OmniFocus VPN Client SQLDeveloper JBoss + ATG Commerce JVM (768 MB of RAM) JBoss + ATG CSC JVM (768 MB of RAM) Ant builds triggered from Eclipse that compile hundreds of Java files and deploy 5k+ files to the various JBoss servers The JVMs have to be restarted frequently to pickup code and config changes While I'm sure there are lots of people who could do their jobs just fine on a SparcStation 5, or any old computer, there are some people who need large amounts of RAM and very fast CPUs in order to not spend their day waiting for builds, JVM restarts, and VMs to come out of swap, etc...
    - swilliams 18y ago
      You can emulate a slow connection using something like YSlow. http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ Intentionally slowing down development time just doesn't seem like the correct approach to me.
- swilliams 18y ago
  No. A slow machine is just aggravating. If I have to wait very long for a compile, the IDE, anything, there's a good chance I am going to get distracted and do something else. I'll typically have tons of things open at once, already slowing things down a bit; having old hardware is just too much on top. It is important to check for performance on slow machines, but that can be done on a virtual machine.
  - light3 18y ago
    Seconded, its extremely aggravating, I remember clearly when I had the horror of working with an old version of .NET C# with a big project on a SHARED slow server, which took roughly 1-2mins to compile, can you imagine trying to learn and debug C# code under this environment? Right, not a good idea.
    - dcminter 18y ago
      Sure, it's annoying. But I didn't say it was nice, I said it was a good incentive for the developer to create software that was snappy. Those suggesting the use of a separate slow test environment are, I submit, being unrealistic about real-world practices in testing.

9 points by twampss 18y ago

jobeirne 18y ago

What an utterly pointless article.

sigh 18y ago
No joke - totally missed the point and went off on an unrelated tangent - real broken record stuff.

dcminter 18y ago

"Developers need fast machines to be productive" Possibly. But one of the advantages of giving developers comparatively slow machines is that it gives them a personal incentive to produce fast software. Of course that's painful when bloaty IDEs come into play, but for web software I'd have to suggest using an under-specced deployment test platform to get some of this benefit.

festivusr 18y ago
Giving developers sub-par machines for "incentive" purposes is... well, crazy. Intentionally slowing down your write-compile-test cycle makes no sense. For web software, you indeed want your test environment to be no faster than production, so it can be slower (within reason), especially if you have a hard time simulating in test loads you expect to see in production.
- gaius 18y ago
  Your developers should have the exact same spec machines as your users. I remember back in the day working for a company whose websites looked gorgeous on the designer's high-end Mac displays on the LAN... The average customer at the time had a 56.6k modem.
  - sigh 18y ago
    Not for development they shouldn't. For testing sure, but are you really going to justify that the development process should take at least twice as long because of poor QA?
    - gaius 18y ago
      I really question whether a fancy machine helps with productivity. Some things are obvious, like plenty of screen real estate so you can switch contexts just by flicking your eyes. But most of the tools are just gratuitous power hogs. Rational Rose, Eclipse, etc. Let's be brutally honest, modern IDEs don't do much that Energize wasn't doing perfectly well well over a decade ago, or that Emacs was doing a decade before that. I could do my job on an old SparcStation 5, and I bet everyone else could too.
      - modoc 18y ago
        That's a bet you'd lose. More specifically I can't without taking a huge hit in productivity (and there are somethings I wouldn't be able to do at all on a Sparc station). In order to do my job, here's a short list of what I run on my MBP: Eclipse (explaining why Eclipse is better for my needs than emacs (which I used to use) would take a while, but lets assume I'm actually more productive with Eclipse) Parallels Linux VM running Oracle 10 XE Parallels Windows XP VM for testing with IE and IE 7, and running a couple of windows only tools I need on occasion Mail.app Adium Safari Firefox iCal iTunes TextMate OmniFocus VPN Client SQLDeveloper JBoss + ATG Commerce JVM (768 MB of RAM) JBoss + ATG CSC JVM (768 MB of RAM) Ant builds triggered from Eclipse that compile hundreds of Java files and deploy 5k+ files to the various JBoss servers The JVMs have to be restarted frequently to pickup code and config changes While I'm sure there are lots of people who could do their jobs just fine on a SparcStation 5, or any old computer, there are some people who need large amounts of RAM and very fast CPUs in order to not spend their day waiting for builds, JVM restarts, and VMs to come out of swap, etc...
  - swilliams 18y ago
    You can emulate a slow connection using something like YSlow. http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ Intentionally slowing down development time just doesn't seem like the correct approach to me.
swilliams 18y ago
No. A slow machine is just aggravating. If I have to wait very long for a compile, the IDE, anything, there's a good chance I am going to get distracted and do something else. I'll typically have tons of things open at once, already slowing things down a bit; having old hardware is just too much on top. It is important to check for performance on slow machines, but that can be done on a virtual machine.
- light3 18y ago
  Seconded, its extremely aggravating, I remember clearly when I had the horror of working with an old version of .NET C# with a big project on a SHARED slow server, which took roughly 1-2mins to compile, can you imagine trying to learn and debug C# code under this environment? Right, not a good idea.
  - dcminter 18y ago
    Sure, it's annoying. But I didn't say it was nice, I said it was a good incentive for the developer to create software that was snappy. Those suggesting the use of a separate slow test environment are, I submit, being unrealistic about real-world practices in testing.