In today’s episode of Developer Things, host Matt Watson speaks to guest Matt Warren. Matt Warren works for CA on their application performance management solutions. He is also involved in the BenchmarkDotNet project and spends time blogging about .NET.
Matt got his start in software development with a programming course in computer science, focusing mostly on Java, while he was in college. After college, he got a job that was part customer support and part programming, supporting customers who were also developers. That job involved C++ and image processing. After a few years, the projects started including C#, so Matt learned that as well. Today, Matt spends a majority of his time doing C# coding.
Some of the highlights of today’s episode include:
- A discussion of Matt’s blog, including some posts that have raced up the charts of Hacker News
- The difference that a couple lines of code can make in performance
- The challenges of improving code for customers
- A discussion of BenchmarkDotNet: what it is, why it’s needed, how it works
- Matt’s description of how BenchmarkDotNet got started
- How people are using BenchMarkDotNet
- Matt’s speaking engagements
- Matt’s favorite developer tool
Useful Links:
Quotes by Matt Warren:
“When you’re writing a tool that’s measuring other people’s performance, you have to have good performance yourself.”
“The main reason I think it’s important is not as much the convenience as the accuracy.”
“If you just want to measure how quick a bit of code is, you don’t necessarily want to know all the internals.”

- Developer Things #7: Making the Lives of IT Easier and More Chocolatey with Rob Reynolds - January 11, 2018
- Developer Things # 6: Professional Speaking and Consulting Advice with Cory House - January 4, 2018
- Developer Things #5: What Is BenchmarkDotNet & Nerding out on Performance with Matt Warren - December 28, 2017
- Developer Things #4: Why 20,000 Developers Love Prefix with Jason Taylor - December 26, 2017
- Developer Things #3: How Stackify Does DevOps Without an Ops Team with Jason Taylor - December 21, 2017