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Comment by elblanco | Hacker News Reader

I know this isn't a popular POV, but I've always thought that developers should work on last gen hardware. Getting good performance out of last gen hardware ensures great performance for the typical user.

(okay, let's be reasonable, the build machine should be stupid fast so nobody is sitting around for half a day while the repository builds).

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I think that would be true for testing, but not for actual development. When I'm working I want to marginalize anything that might slow me down. You did mention the build machine should be fast - but don't most people build locally first before pushing out?

I guess it also depends on what you're building. I mostly work on stuff that isn't used by a consumer. It's going to run as a service on a machine or network of machines far more powerful than my PC. I imagine most people developing for consumers though are building websites or mobile apps. Mobile apps should be tested on a variety of devices, and it would take a pretty intense website to start bogging down most people's machines I imagine.

  > it would take a pretty intense website to start bogging down
  > most people's machines I imagine.

Not necessarily. On an internal website we found that IE8 took 8 seconds (!) to run a jQuery/jQueryUI command to style all of the buttons on a page. Granted there where more than a couple of buttons, but the point is that DOM manipulation can be a time sink if you don't manage it right. (By contrast the same command took ~1s in Chrome and Firefox, which still isn't insignificant).

One second of DOM manipulation _is_ significant.

  > which still isn't insignificant

An extra second of page load isn't as noticable as 8 extra seconds of page load. Especially on older systems where you might be used to some amount of delay (but not 8 seconds of delay on internal apps).

I guess it depends on what your baseline is. For most of my pageviews, an additional second would double the load time. On an internal app/site an additional few seconds usually isn't worth the trouble, but externally can make a real difference: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/googles-marissa-mayer-speed-wi...

I have no trouble writing JavaScript that brings the mightiest of machines to its knees. I try not to ship that, of course.

I suspect that builds, or big IDEs, are the biggest performance sinks for devs. If I'm doing non-.NET stack development, I'm pretty sure I could get by with 1 GB of RAM, and probably less if I don't need to have a database instance running on my workstation.

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