Measure, Benchmark, Ship: Building Better Software with AI

1) You can't improve what you can't see The saying famously goes, "what gets measured gets managed". Or, "the nail that sticks out, gets hammered". Therefore to manage something you must first measure it; to hammer the nail, you must be able to detect it sticking out. It's imperative to identify specific metrics you care about and track them. For Hosaka Studio the big ones are: Time to first paint when opening the app for the first time; Time spent capturing each frame (screen and webcam) in milliseconds; Time to first paint when opening the recording editor; Editor preview playback performance, measured in frames per second and milliseconds spent processing each frame. These metrics are crucial to ensuring the app captures everything at native framerate AND responds instantly to user input. All of these metrics are calculated and logged in debug mode (some are only sampled every 5s). There's also terminal colouring that changes the numbers to red to grab my attention should there be a