Autonomous Testing and the Future of Software Development - Will Wilson

What Hacker News said

Strong rec georgelyon · 2020-07 · on “Against Testing”

I very much agree with this sentiment, but it is difficult to endorse this line of reasoning without offering a better alternative. As folks have pointed out in other comments, there are other values to tests in the broad sense that the author doesn’t address. That said, if you are interested in improving the state of testing, I would encourage you to listen to Will Wilson’s excellent talk on the subject of Autonomous Testing: [this video] Indeed, FoundationDB (which Wilson worked on) has a very unique and sophisticated approach to testing that seems to have served them very well.

Strong rec georgelyon · 2024-02 · on “Is something bugging you?”

Congratulations to the Antithesis team! I actually interviewed with them when they were just starting, and outside of being very technically proficient, they are also a great group of folks. They flew my wife and I out to DC on what happened to be the coldest day of the year that year (we are from California) so we didn’t end up following through but I’d like to think there is an alternative me out there in the multiverse hacking away on this stuff. I highly recommend Will’s talks (which I believe he links in the blog post): [LINK] [this video]

Recommends georgelyon · 2023-07 · on “FoundationDB: A Distributed Key-Value Store”

FoundationDB is a truly one-of-a-kind bit of technology. Others have already linked to the testing methodology that allows them to run orders of magnitude more database hours in test than have run in production: [LINK] A less known but also great talk is the follow which talked about what the a few of the team worked on next, effectively trying to generalize the methodology to any computer program: [this video] I liken the approach to being able to fuzz the execution space of the program, not just the inputs.

Recommends georgelyon · 2024-03 · on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2024)”

Really unique product with a super-strong founding team! I’m not a working with them, but am cheering from the sidelines. One of the founders gives a great talk here: [this video]

Cites chubot · 2019-03 · on “Why isn’t CPU time more valuable?”

FWIW I think that DOES happen, but it happens on the "wrong" computers! Google has at least tens of thousands of cores running builds and tests 24/7. And they're utilized to the hilt. Travis and other continuous build services do essentially the same thing, although I don't know how many cores they have running. From a larger perspective, Github does significant things "in the background" to make me more productive, like producing statistics about all the projects and making them searchable. (Admittedly, it could do MUCH more.) I think part of the problem is that it's cheaper to use "the cloud" than to figure out how to use the developer's own machine! There is a lot of heterogeneity in deve

Cites wwilson · 2019-08 · on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2019)”

Antithesis | DC / Northern Virginia | Onsite | Software Engineers | FULL-TIME | $100k-$150k + equity Antithesis is using deterministic simulation, fuzzing, and AI to improve software testing. The founders are two FoundationDB veterans; for an idea of what we're doing, see my talk here: [this video] . Fully funded medical, dental, and vision insurance. Unlimited vacation (with mandatory MINIMUM vacation time). Flexible hours. We're doing things nobody has done before, so we don't need familiarity with any particular language, framework, domain, or anything like that. Don't care. What we do care about: you're smart, a joy to work with, and are comfortable dealing with open-ended/poorly-defined prob

Cites thecollins · 2021-07 · on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2021)”

Antithesis | DC / Northern Virginia | Onsite | Software Engineers | FULL-TIME | $100k-$150k + equity Antithesis is using deterministic simulation, fuzzing, and AI to improve software testing. The founders and VP Eng are FoundationDB veterans. For an idea of what we're doing, see Will's talk here: [this video] or read the Simulation Testing section of [LINK] . Fully funded medical, dental, and vision insurance. Unlimited vacation (with mandatory MINIMUM vacation time). Flexible hours. We're doing things nobody has done before, so we don't need familiarity with any particular language, framework, domain, or anything like that. Don't care. What we do care about: you're smart, get things done, a joy

Cites thecollins · 2021-08 · on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2021)”

Antithesis | DC / Northern Virginia | ONSITE | Software Engineers | FULL-TIME Antithesis is using deterministic simulation, fuzzing, and AI to improve software testing. The founders and VP Eng are FoundationDB veterans. For an idea of what we're doing, see Will's talk here: [this video] or read the Simulation Testing section of [LINK] . Fully funded medical, dental, and vision insurance. Unlimited vacation (with mandatory MINIMUM vacation time). Flexible hours. We're doing things nobody has done before, so we don't need familiarity with any particular language, framework, domain, or anything like that. Don't care. What we do care about: you're smart, get things done, a joy to work with, and are c