How to -10x Engineer Correctly

Recorded live on twitch, GET IN

MY MAIN YT CHANNEL: Has well edited engineering videos

Discord

[farqueueman]

I recommend creating a random letter generator and deploying it so it inserts random characters on the entire code base... Immediately achieve -100x engineer status ♥

[ISKLEMMI]

"The interface didn't change."
This is only true for the most naïve understanding of what interfaces are. They encompass more than just function signatures.

That bit about gnu parallel was dope! Thanks for sharing!

[kkiller]

“I used to say that when being CEO at Apple wasn’t fun anymore, I’d quit. But now I’ve changed my mind — when being CEO isn’t fun anymore, I’ll just fire people until it is fun again.” -- Michael Scott, CEO of Apple, regarding the massive layoffs undertaken to solve the bozo explosion, a few months before he got fired for it

[daves.software]

19:55 When I worked at the NAIC we had an application that at one point started failing in production. It would fail 9 times, then succeed, then fail 9 times and then succeed. I traced it back to a dynamic SQL query where the code was interpolating an ID value into the SQL string and we had reached the point where the IDs were large enough to trigger a conversion to scientific notation. Unfortunately, in the conversion to scientific notation, one digit of precision was dropped, so if the last digit was non-zero, the query would fail. If the last digit happened to be zero, it would succeed. Good times...

[TOracle]

I met an engineer like this. They promoted him to principal engineer. He doesn't write code, he just rejects everyone else's code and gets a nice bonus for it. Obfuscating requirements just makes all of that easier.

[darioabbece]

You could do this:
-have a case-insensitive language
- define NULL
- define null

Sometimes it will get corrected, sometimes it won't

Of course they should have different usages but vastly overlapping

[DontThinkSo]

Regarding your semver story: defaults ARE part of the interface. If you change defaults, you're changing how someone has to call your function in order to get the same behavior. That's the definition of an interface change.

[attilasedon]

The 4:55-5:23 part. Man I have this right now. We got a "manager" who wants to make the most elegant software and behaves like an architect (I have not seen him write a piece of code). He goes around to everyone touting his ideas and every interaction goes like this: "I don't want to tell you how to do this, but I want to understand and ..." then proceeds to criticize you . And when we have a technical discussion he just pulls everyone into technical vortex of ideas that does not go anywhere, it's tiring to have any technical meetings with him. And my biggest issue is he knows a few things well, and in other things like Frontend/Infra (originally backend developer) he just goes full Dunning–Kruger effect. It's really toxic and he pushes us for to reach unnecessary deadlines (like for a meeting that had little to no importance). And we have already rewritten the backend because of him, next it's gonna be the Frontend or the Infra. :D
I am sad because my team is great, I am on a greenfield where we experiment, and figure a lot of things as we go and it's really fun it's just we have "Him".

[mattius]

The closest thing I've seen to the perfect bug was in a geometric unit test with bad randomisation. It almost never failed when running tests locally, but in the CI pipeline it seemed to almost always fail on master (never on a branch). The fun thing was that rather than generating 10k random polygons, it would generate the same random polygon 10k times 😅 so you had to be really (un)lucky to reproduce it

[therealestsnake]

That test one was soul crushing. I had a coworker who wrote some absolutely horrible test code, so that when I fixed an issue, the entire test file broke and complained. I had to completely rip out the mocking and re-do the file. Great fun!

[christsciple]

Dude I once had a job that had me work across a dozen different departments, each with their own rituals, scrum masters, traditions, and software. Every day I had to deal with a hodgepodge of different jira boards and weird other facilitation dependencies that I never care enough to learn the names to. I spent 3/4 of my time simply in pointless meetings, "social times", and trying to update my tasks across everything rather than actually developing and architecting software. Quit after 6 months. Had me wanting to go back to VBA development

[KayOScode]

I fully agree with your take on threading. I did this a while back on a brute force keyboard layout optimizer. I wrote incredibly optimized code for one thread, but I allowed the isolation of state resources in such a way I can just run it on however many threads I want without an issue. I got insane performance doing that

[shadamethyst]

Speaking of the true magic bug, I had that at work. Sometimes builds would fail because they included invalid code, but when running the build again it would work.

After weeks of having that bug pop up here and there, I finally found out that the Console Ninja extension was modifying files in the node_modules, and those files got compiled into the dev build as-is, breaking the build.

So if you want fun bugs, have a tool that subtly modifies the output binaries, and introduce fragility there. Now your engineers can't treat the compiler as a pure function, and will go crazy.

[lucaslopes]

Take the logarithm of a random number between 0 and 1, and say it is negative. Every number in this interval has a negative log. But sometimes you'll get a number so close to zero, its log will be a huge negative number, causing an overflow.

[karmatraining]

Can we talk about how this is literally also a playbook for extremely high job security for chaotic neutral types

[acasualviewer]

The original research by Tom Demarco that referred to some engineers being 10x more productive than others had more to do with environment than skill, computer language or years of experience. The book "Peopleware" describes this. And it recommends people having private, quiet offices.

The current trend of putting a bunch of people in the same room, and hiring for super engineers, is opposite to what the research was proposing. This common misconception is similar to the one that made governments standardize on the waterfall model, whose original paper mentioned it as how to NOT develop software.

[aredrih]

On the subject of weird c causing random crash, there was the underhanded c contest.
The last entry winner used a dirty typedef tp change the type of the pointer of a function: if you compile the unit of code, it takes f32*; if you include the file it takes f16* (or the otherway around )
The compiler doesn't se a problem. The linker doesn't care.
And you got a really weird edge case were the program errors out

[jacknguyen]

Side note about the side note about the GNU Parallel, I definitely agree. What you're really thinking of is coroutines and asynchronous programming. Essentially every part of the program only needs to be concerned with itself and its connections. Then a separate "manager" controls everything. You don't have to try to control "this thread needs to be spawned" or "this process needs to do this now" or whatever, everything just works and it's the greatest.

[DeathBean]

I'm a data scientist. I was working in R on an old project, and learned that you could redefine the addition operator globally for the interpreter's session. Naturally, I redefined it to randomly add one to the result every now and then. You could fix it by restarting the interpreter session, but if you managed to sneak it into a script that got imported somewhere... :)

[phaneros]

I'm still a pretty young developer, only 2 years out of uni. I've seen some crazy bugs, let me tell you, and you can get away with a lot in a multi-language environment when, say, you're modifying C code and most developers work largely in Java.

Variable names containing a double underscore, or that start with an underscore followed by a capital letter, are reserved for the language / toolchain, but the compiler won't stop you. Back during a co-op, I had a crazy time figuring out why a build wouldn't work when updating the version info handshake from C firmware to a Java host when the version string variable in C looked like firmware__v1_2_3. That __v doesn't do what you might think. I'm sure you can find another sequence of characters that'll fail in a context-dependent way.

This last week I was struggling with an issue that didn't show up in our simulated environment, only on our real device hardware, and only for some systems. Turns out we had a linker script specifying the beginning of the stack was aligned to 8-bytes, but not the end... and a stack canary that was an int, and hence wanted to be aligned to a 4-byte boundary. An unrelated change fixed another invisible bug that led to the wrong linker script being used, so the stack was now in a different region of memory that it now shared with global variables. So the linker could just slip a 1-byte global variable in that little offset and kill the canary on startup. Before communications are established, even, so the device can't even send an error message.

The common theme with these two changes was that they were small parts of mega-merges. That was sadly missing from the overall -10x list -- get your team into a situation where there's a very large merge of death, so that finding bugs can't be done by just looking at small changelists.