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> Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users Answer: because sending short messages from A to B is basically a solved problem. There is even a programming language (Erlang) that was made with this application in mind. The prototypical "Hello World" example for Erlang is a messaging application.
I don't quite understand the correlation. If the article was about how Whatsapp achieves scale and parallelism through functional languages, then fair enough. But I'm not sure it's fair to say they need 50 engineers, in part, because of the language choice ? Surely they need 50 engineers because their product is fairly simple and there's no need to have more engineers than features. Maybe the point it should have mad…
Right. There's not even a way to adjust notification levels based on person or group. I ended up turning off notifications for the whole app, so it stopped serving the same use cases that text messages do. People still need to text or call me if they need an urgent answer.
I would love to see a list of these 50 engineers, their skills and how they are organized. It provides guidance for other teams (even if part of their software is written in Erlang!).
> Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users Answer: because sending short messages from A to B is basically a solved problem. There is even a programming language (Erlang) that was made with this application in mind. The prototypical "Hello World" example for Erlang is a messaging application.
The only thing simpler would be sending messages to a centralized queue for people to fetch. Yet Twitter needs 4100 employees for that (though not all engineers I hope).
I wish there were some good online resources around Erlang. Most of the content is very theoretical and not explanatory. Its hard to find implementation of common algorithms like Sorting, graphs, link-list and other dataStructures in erlang.
> Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users Answer: because sending short messages from A to B is basically a solved problem. There is even a programming language (Erlang) that was made with this application in mind. The prototypical "Hello World" example for Erlang is a messaging application.
Actually, over lossy links, it's well known to be an impossible problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem
WhatsApp seems to be a great example of designing your system with the best tools available. To go from nothing to pretty much being the de-facto modern replacement for SMS in a couple of years is an amazing achievement. I really need to sit down and spend some time properly learning a functional language. I can hack my way through Haskell code but I do it in a very non-Haskell way. I really need to change that. My p…
For Erlang, there is the book by Joe Armstrong: https://pragprog.com/book/jaerlang2/programming-erlang The problem with learning functional languages is finding pragmatic learning materials. I would claim F# is currently the most approachable functional language (just my opinion but I have at least toyed with the other mainstream offerings). My background is also in C++. The F# materials listed helped me personally t…
This is kind of true. But there is a nice community around erlang. I always found good, valueable input at erlangcentral.org and stackoverflow.
I wish there were some good online resources around Erlang. Most of the content is very theoretical and not explanatory. Its hard to find implementation of common algorithms like Sorting, graphs, link-list and other dataStructures in erlang.
But an even better idea is to check out Elixir http://elixir-lang.org/ and http://www.phoenixframework.org/ which have been gaining a lot of steam as of late.
If this isn't a counter to the inane recruiting requirements of "5 years with language X" I don't know what is: We don’t bring them in specifically because the engineer knows Erlang,” Mahdavi said on Monday. “We expect the engineer to come in and spend their first week getting familiar with the language and learning to use the environment. If you hire smart people, they’ll be able to do that.”
" Experience: - 2+ Years of Erlang Programming"
[0]: https://www.whatsapp.com/join/?dept=software-engineering&id=...