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0 pointsjavajosh6y ago0 comments

Software development is the BTD loop; you can't eliminate it. I got my start with Logo[1], which has an amazing BTD loop! People like Bret Victor[2] have talked at length about it (although Victor doesn't use that term, IIRC). Even the trend toward "notebook programming" - Jupyter, Observable, etc are really about shortening that loop. A major reason to use an IDE is to potentially shorten the BTD loop. Lots and lots of tools exist specifically to shorten this loop.

And yet some organizations want to run all the linters, all the tests, for all the languages, orchestrated by Jenkins on a huge Amazon cluster. This is bad.

[1] This is very cool - an Apple IIe emulator running Logo in the browser. https://www.scullinsteel.com/apple2/#logo

[2] Inventing on Principle has improving the BTD loop at its core https://vimeo.com/36579366

0 comments

Aperocky6y ago

Well, I don't see how linters/test on a final cluster is bad. This is why we have unit/integration/alpha/canary tests. The first 1 can happen on my laptop over 5 seconds while the second can happen on my personal instance over 20 minutes. Usually first means the second will pass and I just need to run it in the background without breaking any workflows.

i.e. It might not be a bad feedback loop, you just need more of them that are faster.

celticmusic6y ago

5 seconds is already painful, the point of the other poster is to delay that stuff until the end. When the BTD loop is long it's a looooooot harder to get into the flow, and you have difficult really thinking about the problem.

Imagine trying to read a novel but after every paragraph you had to stop and wait for 5-10 seconds.

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