Dan Luu
Programmer who has worked on hardware verification at Centaur, on infrastructure at Microsoft and Google, and latterly at Wave. He writes long, data-heavy posts at danluu.com that test the software industry's folk wisdom against whatever evidence can actually be found.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
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We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordscomputers are fast enough that high-traffic apps can be served with simple architectures, which can generally be created more cheaply and easily than complex architectures
↗In defense of simple architecturesdanluu.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsDespite the unreasonable effectiveness of simple architectures, most press goes to complex architectures.
↗In defense of simple architecturesdanluu.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThe cost of our engineering team completely dominates the cost of the systems we operate
↗In defense of simple architecturesdanluu.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 6 years earlier
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Their wordsThe data are clear that humans are really bad at taking the time to do things that are well understood to incontrovertibly reduce the risk of rare but catastrophic events.
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Their wordsIt's well studied in a number of other contexts including healthcare, aviation, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, and civil engineering, but we don't see it discussed in the context of software.
- 2 weeks earlier
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Their wordsas an application developer, writing to files safely is hard enough that it should be done via some kind of library and/or database, not by directly making syscalls
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Their wordsThese studies also hammer home the point that conventional testing isn't sufficient.
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Their wordsAlmost every software project I've seen has a lot of low hanging testing fruit.
- 13 months earlier
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Their wordsIf I had to guess, I'd say I probably work around hundreds of bugs in an average week, and thousands in a bad week.
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Our reading
How much to test is an economic calculation a team should actually run, not a matter of principle.
Their wordsThe point isn't that you should definitely write more tests, it's that you should definitely do the math to see if you should write more tests.
- 11 days earlier
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Their wordsThe summary of the summary is that most studies find very small effects, if any.
↗Literature review on the benefits of static typesdanluu.com 1st of 5 in this piece
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Their wordsSo the intermediate result appears to not be that TypeScript is reliable, but that projects mis-identified as TypeScript are reliable.
↗Literature review on the benefits of static typesdanluu.com 2nd of 5 in this piece
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Their wordsBut while I like languages with expressive type systems, I haven't noticed that they make me more productive or less bug prone
↗Literature review on the benefits of static typesdanluu.com 3rd of 5 in this piece
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Their wordsIt's true that controlled studies only tell you something about a very limited set of circumstances, but the fix to that isn't to dismiss them, but to fund more studies.
↗Literature review on the benefits of static typesdanluu.com 4th of 5 in this piece
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Their wordsMaybe, but if the strongest statement you can make for your position is that there's no empirical evidence against the position, that's not much of a position.
↗Literature review on the benefits of static typesdanluu.com 5th of 5 in this piece