I've seen the question "what is the best gaming WiFi" several times this week.

The answer is "cat5e or higher".
Yes that's a smartass answer, but seriously: if you can at all possible: cable!

WiFi is, in most homes, a time-share based model and the weakest/lowest device still dictates some of the overall behavior. It's not the bandwidth, it's the stalls when it's other people's turn.
I've covered this before, but it's worth saying again: we represent units in seconds because that's how *humans* can reasonably compare them. Computers operate in nanoseconds. You need to break down what's inside a second, then the lower time intervals matter for your purpose.
For example, do you say "I have a 1s ping"? Well I hope not, because that's horrible. You say "I have a 20ms ping", or 50ms, the point is that's 1/20th of a second. We need to look at something more finite than a second to do anything meaningful.
Okay now, your WiFi will be switching out those time slots for traffic, usually multiple times per second. Let's talk bandwidth, say we have 100ms slices:
0-100ms: 500mbps
101-200ms: 0 mbps
201-400ms: 500mbps
401-500ms: 0 mbps
...repeat...
That's 250mbps, not too shabby!
...but if say you clicked to perform a game action in that 2nd 101-200ms interval when it wasn't your turn to send, it might be up to 100ms before it sends (we're just using 100ms as an example here - it'll vary).

So overall: bandwidth seems fine, but latency varies on WiFi.
And in general: I recommend giving a bit of thought on what "per second" metrics really mean. I did a thread a while back on that here, I hope it's useful:

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More from @Nick_Craver

22 Oct
I am really not a fan of GitHub Actions change. A YAML file format for key value pairs and...we can't use it? Environmental variables for a build are super common, at least for me, and now all config support is tossed away:
github.blog/changelog/2020…
Okay my fault! If you're hitting this it is *not* the env: lines (I'm going to poke that this get clarified in the docs, since the only way listed is the other way). env: works fine, it's an older version of Nerdbank.GitVersioning (not that old) causing it here...upgrade to fix.
Props to @m0sa who's already hit this for pointing me at the cause...I would have hunted for a while there.
Read 4 tweets
8 Oct
I cannot wait to *not* maintain a build server anymore.
Building on the latest software on agents you maintain is fine when stable, and not fine when moving fast on platforms.

To canary Stack Overflow on .NET 5 I need to build on TeamCity, but it's not detecting .NET 5 right, so I need to upgrade, which means chasing a license and...
Yeah, it's yaks. I just want to run dotnet build and you think that'd be simple but no - it can't be simple. They have to do fancy detection and lots of mess.

On GitHub Actions we'll be able to just pick an SDK version to install and go anytime - a self-contained app to deploy.
Read 4 tweets
8 Oct
Was using the MacBook on my bike just fine about 20 minutes ago…opened the lid and no display (reboot, etc. doesn’t fix…trying more resets). How’s your morning going?
I’ve tried all the keyboard-based resets: no dice. Time to take it apart and yank the battery.
“The new normal”
Read 11 tweets
21 Sep
I think it’s time to re-wire the house. Running everything through 2 floors up to my office isn’t really practical and would exhausting…so I’m thinking 2x10gb down to a 24x PoE in the basement with a local battery backup for it. The white pipe here goes almost to the attic: ImageImage
There will be a rack up in my office closet later (or maybe sooner than later)...I'm thinking a small 6U conditioned rack down here. All it'll have for now is the 1U switch and a 1-2U battery backup. And maybe a media converter for fiber...all of this is in prep for a fiber swap.
I'm *assuming* AT&T won't let me plug into this switch from the fiber converter on it's own VLAN before going to their gateway and use the 20gb backhaul upstairs where the gateway will live...but if anyone is doing this rather than running a dedicated line I'm super curious.
Read 44 tweets
2 Sep
To someone new, IMO a mentors primary jobs are:
1. Be there.
2. Be welcoming.
3. Be patient.
4. Make sure they're recognized.
5. Be a DNS server. They don't know to go or who to ask, you'll be asked for a "who...?" a lot. Documentation helps, but is rarely 100%.

#DevDiscuss
Mentoring comes first.
Your work comes second.
Ideally, pair on things to do both.

YOU NEED THE BACKING OF MANAGEMENT/PM/ETC. ON THIS.

The last part is critical. It's a marathon and you're supposed to be investing. Don't sacrifice tomorrow to ship something today.

#DevDiscuss
Mentoring cannot be an afterthought or something "on the side". It has to be a primary function and a priority. It's not fair to either side if it's anything less.

The org needs to make it a priority if they're serious about it. And if they do, it'll pay dividends.

#DevDiscuss
Read 4 tweets
7 Jul
We only cache a few things on the Question page for Stack Overflow (and all Q&A sites).

Loaded live (from SQL) are: your user (top bar), the question, answers, comments, users, your votes, flags (for mods).

We cache some sidebar: linked and related questions, for 5 minutes.
When you consider how many questions are on the network (over 27 million active), the chances of a user hitting the same question _on the same server_ (it's a local cache) within those 5 minutes is basically just the very hot or very new questions.

So is it worth caching at all?
Today, we're going to test.

I have a PR in that adds a setting to remove all caching and just query it live, as a single query with 2-3 result sets and Dapper reads them off. This means 1 SQL roundtrip for latency. I think it'll perform better, and eat far less cache:
Read 13 tweets

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