Walden Yan
speaker
387 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
Walden Yan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They were looking into it and they're like, oh, you know what?
We realized that actually the root causes problem is actually super simple, but like fine, fine grained detail, which is that a lot of these virtual machines actually underlying them don't use real file systems.
They use these like network file systems where things are actually cached over the network, actually in S3.
So when you're grepping, you're actually making network calls every time you're doing these things.
And that's why grep is extremely slow on these machines.
And so, again, it goes back to, you know, what is all the crazy info work that we had to do to actually get these machines working?
If you try to do this yourself, you know, there are tons of small details like this.
And so we had to eventually go swap out that network file system.
Oh, that was a whole other thing.
That's a different thing.
The block diff file storage format.
which is a file system format that we built so that the VMs could be spun up and down very quickly.
Basically, the intuition behind this is imagine you have a terabyte of disk and your agent only wrote 100 lines of code on top of that disk.
How long does it take to save and bring up that disk?
And most systems, because you're not optimizing for this case, it's just like on the order of a terabyte of work because you have to save all of that and bring it back up.
In our system, we try to build a file system that incrementally builds on top of each other.
So every time you save and bring the machine back up, you're only doing work that is proportional to effectively the diff in the file system.
And so this...
you know, shaves off a lot of time in the boot up process of Devon.
I think this is actually now outdated.
Showing 261–280 of 387 · page 14 of 20
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