Coding Horror: Pressing the Software Turbo Button

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001173.html

by twampss • 18 years ago

9 13 18 years ago

codinghorror.com

jobeirne• 18 years ago

What an utterly pointless article.

sigh2• 18 years ago

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

dcminter2• 18 years 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• 18 years 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.

gaius2• 18 years 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.

swilliams2• 18 years 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• 18 years 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.

Coding Horror: Pressing the Software Turbo Button

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