# Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

DevFeed: [Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/tracking-developer-build-times-to-decide-if-the-m3-macbook-is-worth-upgrading-11776.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://incident.io/blog/festive-macbooks>)

Author: Lawrence Jones

Published: 2023-12-19T14:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The incident.io Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-incident-io-blog.md>)

Topics: [build times](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/build-times.md>), [Go Language](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/go-language.md>), [telemetry](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/telemetry.md>), [Hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/hardware.md>), [developer-productivity](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/developer-productivity.md>)

Tags: [build-times](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/build-times.md>), [building](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/building.md>), [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [compiler](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/compiler.md>), [developer](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/developer.md>), [developer-productivity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/developer-productivity.md>), [developers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/developers.md>), [development](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/development.md>), [github](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/github.md>), [go](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/go.md>), [hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hardware.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [incident-channel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-channel.md>), [incident-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-management.md>), [incident-response](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-response.md>), [local](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/local.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [post-mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/post-mortem.md>), [slack-incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/slack-incident.md>), [speed](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/speed.md>), [telemetry](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/telemetry.md>), [upgrade](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/upgrade.md>)

## AI overview

The article describes an experiment to determine whether upgrading developers from M1 or M2 MacBooks to M3 MacBook Pros would improve productivity enough to justify the cost. The team used Go compilation speed as the key performance metric and built a custom hot-reloader to collect build-time telemetry.

## Source excerpt

When our CTO said "I'll upgrade your MacBook if you can prove it's worthwhile", we embarked on a journey including (re)building a Go hot-reloader, instrumenting developer builds, analyzing compiler performance, and feeding an AI model the data until we had an answer.