Jon Kruger

When you go to work and write code, you have one main tool that you use - your dev machine. The power of your machine will partially determine how fast you can get things done.

How often does your company buy you a new machine? Every 2 years? Every 3 years?

I don’t know many companies where developers get new machines every 2 years or less. I’m here to show you why waiting longer than this makes no sense.

It makes no sense because hardware is cheap, but developers are expensive. I’m currently on a project where I’m working on dev machines that were purchased in early 2008. I’ve worked on other projects with machines that were 6 months old that were considerably faster.

On my project, it takes about 45 seconds to compile the solution. But what if I could reduce that to 40 seconds per compile by buying a brand new top-of-the-line machine?

Let’s say that I compile every 5 minutes. So in an 8 hour day, I compile 96 times. Each day, I will save 480 seconds, or 8 minutes. If I work 1900 hours in a year (which equates to about 11 months of work days since most people have about one month of work days in PTO), I will save 1900 minutes, or 31.6 hours.

Let’s say that the average developer on your team makes $75,000 a year. If that were the case and you worked 1900 hours, you are making $39.47/hr. This means that if you save 31.6 hours of this developer’s time, you are essentially saving $1250 over the course of the year.

For $1250, I can buy a pretty good dev machine, especially if I don’t buy monitors to go with it and use existing monitors. I think I used pretty conservative numbers here too:

• I think I could probably cut compile time by more than 5 seconds by replacing a 2-year-old machine with a new one.
• I probably compile more than every 5 minutes (especially when I’m making failing tests pass or making little changes in the app and running the app to see if it worked).
• I only looked at compile time — I didn’t look at how long it takes for a machine to run tests, how long it takes to run long-running database queries, or how long it takes for your app to start up.
• I didn’t account for the productivity hit developers take because they switch their focus on to something else for 45 seconds while they wait for the solution to compile.
• Some developers make more than $75,000, and if you’re dealing with consultants, you have higher hourly rates.
• Many developers work more than 1900 hours a year.
• I didn’t take into account the feeling your developers get when you reward them with shiny new hardware, which will make them feel like you really care about them.

Even with my conservative estimates, I would say it is definitely worth it to buy new machines at least every 2 years. You might even be able to argue that you should buy machines every year. You would have to do the math and see if it’s worth it.

Convincing IT managers to go for this is difficult for some reason, even when you show them the numbers. So many IT managers will tell you that spending is frozen, or that they don’t have money in the budget for hardware, or that it’s not fair to buy the dev team new machines but not buy <insert team that doesn’t really need it> new machines. Are you serious? You would rather have your developers, who are expensive relative to the cost of hardware, have to sit and wait longer for the solution to compile? This is short-sighted thinking. You’re pretty much guaranteed some level of return on that investment within a year.

If you’re going to hold your developers to a high standard, empower them to meet these expectations and make sure that you’re giving them the best tools available.

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I had a simple problem today. I had to turn this:

… into this:


[TestFixture]
public class When_depositing_money_into_an_account : Specification
{
    [Test]
    public void should_add_the_specified_amount_into_the_account()
    {
 
    }
}
 
[TestFixture]
public class When_withdrawing_money_from_an_account : Specification
{
    [Test]
    public void should_withdraw_the_specified_amount_from_the_account()
    {
 
    }
 
    [Test]
    public void should_specify_that_the_withdrawal_was_successful()
    {
 
    }
}


I really didn’t want to do all of this typing every time, so I wrote code to do it for me. It works like this:

1) Copy the acceptance criteria text onto the clipboard
2) Run Specs2Tests.exe (will put the code onto the clipboard for you)
3) Paste the code into your code file

Now I can get all of my acceptance criteria nailed down in a text file where I don’t have the ceremony of a programming language, then let something convert them into tests. Since I just cranked this out today, I’m guessing that it doesn’t handle every scenario that you might think of, and it only writes out C# code. There is no reason that it couldn’t spit out VB.NET, RSpec, or anything else. If it doesn’t do what you want, get on github, create a fork, and send me a patch!

The code is here: http://github.com/jonkruger/specs2tests. Have fun.

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During the last week I was able to go to two software development conferences, the Ann Arbor Day of .NET and Stir Trek. I love these events because I get to see a lot of people that I don’t get to see on a regular basis.

On the other hand, I don’t feel like I get much out of the sessions anymore. It’s not that the sessions are bad, but I feel like I’ve heard a 100/200 level talk on pretty much everything I want to hear about. At each of these conferences there have been some talks that I have really enjoyed, but a lot that I don’t have a real interest in hearing again.

Granted, I’ve been to more of these events than a lot of people. I remember the first time I went to events like this and they were awesome. I was learning a ton of stuff and it was new and exciting.

I miss that feeling. I certainly don’t know it all. I know there is a lot that I could learn. But I guess I’m ready for a new kind of conference. Some ideas floating around in my head:

• A conference featuring mostly 300-400 level talks
• A BarCamp style event where anyone can sign up and show code
• An all open space conference

I know there are conferences like this. I know I’m not the only person who thinks this because I’ve talked to other people feeling the same way. I’ve heard of some of these conferences, but they’ve been other places other than Central Ohio. For example, look at the session list for the most recent ALT.NET Seattle event and notice the difference between this event and the various Day of .NET events. Granted, the target audience is different. But I’m a part of that target audience. I don’t always have the time and money to travel to these events.

I think part of the problem is the wide breadth of technologies in the .NET space. In the last year Microsoft has released Silverlight 4, Windows Mobile 7, .NET 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, OData, and probably other stuff that I can’t remember off the top of my head. So it’s really easy to come up with an “Intro to <insert new MS tech here>” because there are so many choices. Often times these are compelling topics, don’t get me wrong. But every day I go to work and I’m working on plain old web apps or Winforms apps or WPF apps like the rest of you. I want someone to come talk about how I can do better at what I’m doing every day. Show me how to better implement design patterns, or how to test my code better, or how you structure your MVC app to take advantage of jQuery validation, or how to use some ORM, etc. Those things will help me do a better job on the projects that I’m working on today. Sure, I’m curious about Windows Mobile 7 and Silverlight and OData, but my first priority is to get better at the stuff I’m using at work right now.

I feel like I’m getting a lot of talks that might pique my curiosity about new technology, but not a whole lot about how I can improve at the stuff I already know. I’m talking about talks like Nate Kohari’s talk at MIX about how he built Agile Zen with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery. When I watched this talk, I got some ideas on how to do some things, but I also realized that Nate is doing some crazy stuff with jQuery and JavaScript that I would’ve never thought of. It showed me some things that I need to go learn that could really help me on my current ASP.NET MVC project.

Please don’t think I’m criticizing conferences like Stir Trek or the Ann Arbor Day of .NET, because they’re good events put on by volunteers who spend their own time to put it on without any compensation, and I’m really thankful that people spend their time so that we can have community events like this.

I guess I’m just looking how I can take my daily work to the next level.

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