“Craptop duty”[1]. (Third time in three years I’m posting an essentially identical comment, hah.)

[1] https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/

I now wonder if it'd be a good idea to move our end to end tests to a pretty slow vm instead of beefy 8 core 32gb ram machine and check which timeouts will be triggered because our app may have been unoptimized for slower environments...

For blocking presubmit checks, getting the fastest machine you can is probably reasonable. Otherwise, the advantage of the craptop approach is that it needs basically no infra work and gives an immediate impression of the site, and not CI, being slow.

If you’re willing to build some infra, there’s probably a lot more you can do—nightly slow-hardware runs come to mind immediately, browser devtools have a convincing builtin emulation of slow connections, a page displaying a graph of test runtime over time[1] isn’t hard to set up, etc.—but I don’t really have experience with that.

[1] See e.g. https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/overview?numDays=3....

I kid you not a few jobs ago I found several race conditions in my code and tests by running them at the same time as a multi threaded openssl burn test. :)

It’s worth doing at least sometimes; schedule an over The Weekend-to-Weekend test on slow hardware and log the issues.

Even if you don’t fix them, knowing where the weak points are is valuable for when they do snap in production.

Gonna bookmark that article for tomorrow, craptop duty is such a funny way to put it.

Similarly, a colleague I had before insisted on using a crappy screen. Helped a lot to make sure things stay visible on customers’ low contrast screens with horrible viewing angles, which are still surprisingly common.

Music producers often have some shitty speakers known as grot boxes that they use to make sure their mix will sound as good as it can on consumer audio, not just on their extremely expensive studio monitors. Chromebooks are perfectly analogous. As a side note, today I learned that Grotbox is now an actual brand: https://grotbox.com

Doesn't having a brand for that kinda go against the definition?

Based on the website they're banking on people thinking they were always a brand, and thus a lot of artists use their speakers?

Based on the damage rate for company laptop screens, one can usually be sure anything high-end will be out of your own pocket. =3