Live data from Hacker News

Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

wired.com

251–255 of 255 posts

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#251
post #250

Does anyone know if WhatsApp uses Scrum (or similar methodology)? Also, do they do pair programming? My company has recently learned about scrum and pair-programming, that seems like the only way to success to them. So, it would be nice to know how other successful companies are organized and develop software.

Only comments as to a part of your question, but: "Employees rarely attend a meeting". Stand-ups are still meetings.

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't a great article from wired. I feel the language choice is probably the least contributing factor in terms of what's interesting at that scale. Yes, it's an eclectic choice, but I find systems/component architecture much more interesting than language and program architecture in scaling considerations. A bit more info here: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-... With regard to fun ch…

I posted this on /r/programming earlier, and there was a fantastic response from /u/MyTribeCalledQuest. It's here https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3l2spe/why_wha... In its entirety: I can explain a bit more in depth than the author did. Erlang uses a model known as the actor model. This means that each part of your program is a completely independent entity like a mailbox, known as an actor. For one acto…

That comment's description of Erlang is wrong.

In Erlang, message queues are tied to processes. You can't have multiple processes reading from the same mailbox without writing your own message broker process to implement a multi-reader mailbox.

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate what is is that F# taught you, and how it changed the way you work?

I realize you're using a throwaway account, but this is really more like an essay, not a HN comment (cue up snarky observations about the length of my comments). There were four or five things that all came together at the same time for me: lean startup, functional programming, TDD, and static page web programming. If you're interested, my contact details are in my profile. Happy to have a call/Skype. It's an importa…

maybe a blog post and post it on hn?

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#254

For reference, Level Money sold to C1 and had 1 backend engineer, 1 android engineer, and 1 ios engineer. This scale isn't unusual at all. Really it's a lot more about feature development. The smart way to build most mobile startups is to use managed providers like google app engine, AWS Container Service, or Heroku. Between that and how not-bad both Android and iOS are to develop for these days (compared to their hi…

>This scale isn't unusual at all How many apps are used by 13% of the world population every month?

Depending on your architecture, this difference is often immaterial. That's what people don't get.

When architected correctly, the actual amount of code to be written and maintained is quite low. And an easy way to jump-start that architecture is to have other people who have amortized the cost into a service model do that work for you.

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#255
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't a great article from wired. I feel the language choice is probably the least contributing factor in terms of what's interesting at that scale. Yes, it's an eclectic choice, but I find systems/component architecture much more interesting than language and program architecture in scaling considerations. A bit more info here: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-... With regard to fun ch…

I don't know I found the article decent _for_ being on wired. Didn't expect BEAM VM internals there... > I feel the language choice is probably the least contributing factor in terms of what's interesting at that scale. However, as they say "right from the horses' mouths", WhatsApp engineers have said that Erlang and FreeBSD are critical tools for their success. One can accuse them of lying, of course, but why? Here…

"One can accuse them of lying, of course, but why?"

I never said that.

Post reply on HN