Not Only Luck.
An essay by John Melonakos

Hardcore Software Engineering Anecdotes

I am constantly proud of the software engineers working with me. They are awesome and push boundaries of excellence.

Our company is all about pushing software performance. We sell to people that are already really good at software, which means we have to be all that much better at what we do. It is the single biggest challenge we face as a company:  to be so good at what we do that other really talented people will use our products and hire our services.

Today I was chatting with one team member, Gallagher Pryor, about his work. In our brief conversation, here are anecdotes that emerged:

  • Last week the heat was out at the Village, so a few engineers left to go find warmer coffee shops. They had to tether their computers to the internet to get work done. They were worried about using too much cellular bandwidth on their phone data plans, so they found ways to minimize their consumption and maximize their productivity. Combined, they only used 48 MB of bandwidth in an entire day of work, by turning off X11 and only using a terminal console with embedded Emacs.
  • One project’s primary machine is an old Sony laptop running 4 virtual machines. That laptop has an up-time of 87 days, meaning it has not been rebooted in that time.
  • As the engineers develop, they have been logging their keystrokes in the hope of discovering better terminal compression algorithms for future bandwidth minimization.
  • There has been discussion about how vertically splitting a development screen consumes more bandwidth than horizontally splitting it.

Great software engineers care about their production environment. Like any master craftsman, they are constantly looking for ways to improve their tools and the skills with the tools. I love all of it and eat up great productivity pushing approaches.

What are your thoughts on great software engineering?

 

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From the conversation

Comments preserved from the original post.

Pavan Yalamanchili

“One project’s primary machine is an old Sony laptop running 4 virtual machine”

That is an 4 core (x2 hyper threaded) sandy bridge laptop. Pretty good hardware if you ask me 🙂