Similarly, we needed to measure how much faster the new laptops are, to calculate time saved. We multiply that by our average build times to get a sense for how much time each engineer spends “waiting for the compiler” each day. In our case, that required estimating how much time these new laptops would likely save the average engineer each day and multiplying out appropriately.īased on rough usage patterns, we assumed an average iOS engineer does around five clean builds and 30 incremental builds each day. Instead of recovering the investment in dollars, it can be recovered in engineering time that would have been otherwise lost. It’s simply a function of the expected time savings and the engineering cost.

We wanted to get ahead of the game, so we started to make a business case for upgrading our entire iOS team to these new laptops as soon as possible.įrom a business standpoint, the math is straightforward: An investment in developer productivity has a “payback period”. We’ll talk about a few of the approaches we’re taking to increase development velocity, but the first one is also the easiest: buy your iOS engineers new M1 Max Macbook Pros!! New M1 MacBooks make everything fasterĪpple released the consumer-grade M1 chips in the Mac Mini and MacBook Air in late 2020 (with impressive performance), and was widely rumored to be releasing the new MacBook Pros soon after. At DoorDash, we’ve been working to minimize this latency, keeping our development fast and our engineers happy. Software development is a very iterative process, so the amount of time between making a small code change and being able to test/experience that change is very important to overall developer productivity.

However, as the size of a codebase increases and the number of contributing developers multiplies, that feeling of rapid progress can degrade into a slow trudge. As anyone who has done iOS for a long time will tell you, there is a magical feeling of starting a new project and quickly creating something from scratch. The tools are largely free, and there is a plethora of quality educational content available online, including some from Apple itself. It’s never been easier to get into iOS development than it is today.

Which mac to buy for xcode