Viewing profile — cletus

I worked on Google Fiber's TV distribution system so know something about this although GFiber's TV offering was IPv4 multicast not IPv6. For anyone unfamiliar, modern video codecs…

I have to disagree with this as someone who worked at Meta (and Google). WhatsApp was a textbook example of how not to do an acquisition. The story I heard was when it was acquired…

If I were the CTO of any of these companies I would be working my butt off to be making an internal version of Claude. Let me explain my reasoning using Google as an example (discl…

There's more history than this. Disclaimer: Xoogler (2010-2017). When I first started the environment you used depended entirely on language. In the C++ and Python space, there was…

I worked at Google a long time ago now during the whole Google+ fiasco. One thing that was super controversial internally was the so-called Real Names policy. For those who don't k…

Story time. I used to work for Facebook (and Google) and lots of games were played around bugs. At some point the leadership introduced an SLA for high then medium priority bugs. W…

So there's some survivor bias here but it's generally not bad advice. You should be focusing on outcomes like improving SLAs, top line metrics and so on. You should be solving user…

I'm going to pick out 3 points: > 2. Being right is cheap. Getting to right together is the real work > 6. Your code doesn’t advocate for you. People do > 14. If you win every deba…

The mistake was not having nullability be expressed in the type system. At Facebook I used their PHP fork Hack a lot and Hack has a really expressive type system where PHP does not…

As an early user of SO [1], I feel reasonably qualified to discuss this issue. Note that I barely posted after 2011 or so so I can't really speak to the current state. But what I c…

Imagine you're testing a service to creates, queries and deletes users. A fake version of that service might just be a wrapper on a HashMap keyed by ID. It might have several field…

My second project at Google basically killed mocking for me and I've basically never done it since. Two things happened. The first was that I worked on a rewrite of something (usin…

Story time. This has basically nothing to do with this post other than it involves a limit of 10,000 but hey, it's Christmas and I want to tell a story. I used to work for Facebook…

People should go to jail for this. Anyone who has worked on a large migration eventually lands on a pattern that goes something like this: 1. Double-write to the old system and the…

I realize scale makes everything more difficult but at the end of the day, Netflix is encoding and serving several thousand videos via a CDN. It can't be this hard. There are a few…

The key part here is "machine utilization" and absolutely there was a ton of effort put into this. I think before my time servers were allocated to projects but even early on in my…

So I've worked for Google (and Facebook) and it really drives the point home of just how cheap hardware is and how not worth it optimizing code is most of the time. More than a dec…

Sure. First you need to separate buffered and unbuffered channels. Unbuffered channels basically operate like cooperate async/await but without the explictness. In cooperative mult…

Google has over the years tried to get several new languages off the ground. Go is by far the most successful. What I find fascinating is that all of them that come to mind were co…

A lot of the time, a lack of bugfixes comes from the incentive structure management has created. Specifically, you rarely get rewarded for fixing things. You get rewarded for shipp…

Xoogler here. I never worked on Fuchsia (or Android) but I knew a bunch of people who did and in other ways I was kinda adjacent to them and platforms in general. Some have suggest…

You're alluding to the double taxation problem with dividends. This is a problem and has had a bunch of bad solutions (eg the passthrough tax break from 2017) when in fact the solu…

Reinvesting in the company is the one thing we should absolutely subsidize. That goes to wages, capital expenditure and other measures to sustain and grow the company. Paying out d…

I'm all for root cause analysis. A big part of that is that large companies become extremely risk-tolerant because history has shown there is little to no downside to their actions…