A personal story about 10× development

During the last few days there has been an ongoing Twitter storm about 10× developers. And like all the ones before it (and all the future ones that will inevitably happen) the debate immediately devolved into name calling and all the other things you'd except from Twitter fights. This blog post is not about that. Instead it is about a personal experience about productivity that I had to experience closer than I would have liked.

Some years ago I was working for company X on product Y. All in all it was quite a nice experience. We had a small team working on a code base that was pretty good. It had nice tests, not too many bugs, and when issues did arise they were usually easy to fix. Eventually the project was deemed good enough and we were transferred to work on different projects.

I have no idea what our "industry standard performance multiplier" was when we worked on that project, but for the sake of argument let's call it 1×.

The project I got transferred to was the thing of nightmares. It was a C++ project and all the bad things that have ever been said about C++ were true about that code base. There was not much code but it was utterly incomprehensible. There were massively deep inheritance hierarchies, , compilation speed was measured in minutes for even the most trivial changes, and so on. It was managed by an architecture astronaut that, as one is wont to do, rewrote existing mature libraries as header only template libraries that were buggy and untested (one could even say untestable).

Thus overnight I went from being a 1× down to being a 0.1× or possibly even a 0.01× developer. Simply trying to understand what a specific function was supposed to do took hours. There was, naturally, a big product launch coming up so we needed to get things finished quickly. All in all it was a stressful, frustrating and unpleasant situation to be in. And that was not the worst of it.

After a few weeks my manager wanted to talk to me in private. He was very concerned about the fact that I had not achieved any visible progress for a while. Then I explained to him in detail all the problems in the current project. I even demonstrated how compiling a simple helloworld-level program with the frameworks we had to use took tens of seconds on the beefiest i7 desktop machine I had available. He did not seem to be able to grasp any of that as his only response was "but you used to be so productive in your previous project". Shortly thereafter the same boss started giving me not-al-all-thinly-veiled accusations that I was just slacking off and that this could lead to serious reprimands.

This story does not have a happy ending. The project eventually failed (due to completely different reasons, though), money was squandered and almost everyone involved got fired. In the aftermath I seriously considered getting out of the software engineering business altogether. The entire experience had been so miserable that becoming a 0× developer was seriously tempting.

Is there something we can learn from this?

The "×ness" of any developer does not exist in a vacuum but depends on many organizational things. The most obvious one is tooling. If you have a CI where tests take 30 minutes to run or your developers have underpowered old laptops, everyone's performance goes down. In fact, the overall health of the code base probably has a bigger effect on developer productivity than all developers' skills combined.

But even more important than technical issues are things that promote healthy team dynamics. These include things like blameless postmortems, openness to ideas from everyone, permission to try new things even if they may fail, stern weeding out of jerk behaviour and, ultimately, trust.

If you work on getting all of these things in your working environment then you may find that you find yourself with a 10× team. And if you do, the entire concept of a single 10× developer becomes meaningless.

Initializing all local variables with Clang-Tidy

A common source of all kinds of bugs is using variables without properly initializing them. Out of all security problems this one is the simplest to fix, just convert all declarations of type int x; to int x=0;. The main reason for not doing that is laziness, manually going through existing code bases and adding initialization statements is boring and nobody wants to do that.

Fortunately nowadays we don't have to. Clang-tidy provides a nice toolkit for writing source code refactoring tools for C and C++. As an exercise I wrote a checker to do this. It is submitted upstream and is undergoing code review. Implementing it was fairly straightforward. There were only two major problems. The first one was that existing documentation consists mostly of reference manuals. There is no easy to follow tutorials, only Doxygen pages. But if you dig around on the net and work on it a bit, you can get it working.

The second, and bigger, obstacle is that doing anything in the LLVM code base is sloooow. Everything in LLVM and Clang is linked to single, huge, monolithic libraries which take forever to link. Because of reasons I started doing this work on my secondary machine, which is a 4 core i5 with 16 gigs of RAM. I had to limit simultaneous linker jobs to 2 because otherwise it would just crash spectacularly to an out of memory error. Presumably it is impossible to compile the code base on a machine that has only 8 gigs of RAM. It seems that if you want to do any real development on LLVM you need a spare data center to run the compilations, which is unfortunate.

There is an evil hack to work around this, though. Set the CMake build type to Debug and then change CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_DEBUG and CMAKE_C_FLAGS_DEBUG from -g to -Og. This makes the compilation faster and reduces memory usage to a fraction of the original. The downside is that there is no debug information, but it turns out to not be necessary when writing simple Clang-Tidy checkers.

Once all that is done the actual checker is almost trivial. This is the part that looks up all local variables without initial values:

void InitLocalVariablesCheck::registerMatchers(MatchFinder *Finder) {
  Finder->addMatcher(
      varDecl(unless(hasInitializer(anything()))).bind("vardecl"), this);
}

Then you determine what the initial value should be based on the type of the variable and add a warning and a fixit:

diag(location, "variable %0 is not initialized")
    << MatchedDecl;
diag(location, "insert initial value", DiagnosticIDs::Note)
    << FixItHint::CreateInsertion(
           location.getLocWithOffset(VarName.size()),
           InitializationString);

All in all this amounts to about 100 lines of code plus tests.

But what about performance?

The other major reason not to initialize variables is that it "may cause a runtime performance degradation of unknown magnitude". That is true, but with this tooling the degradation is no longer unknown. You can run the tool and then measure the results. This is trivial for all code bases that have performance benchmarks.