

Coding Horror: Pressing the Software Turbo Button - twampss
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001173.html

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jobeirne
What an utterly pointless article.

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

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dcminter
"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.

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swilliams
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.

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light3
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.

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dcminter
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.

