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Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

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Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#121

Post by franze »

veeralpatel979 wrote: post #112

It's unfortunate that as startups get larger, the speed of improvement on their product often gets slower. It's strange to me that Dropbox has thousands of employees, people have wanted this for a _long_ time, and yet this hasn't been built. You'd think that with more engineering/PM/design talent the product would get better, and faster. Anyone have any insight into why happens? I've never worked at a early stage sta…

Overhiring. Individual productivity goes down the more the company hires. At one point big software companies are only big because they can afford to be big. I wrote about it here https://medium.com/@franz.enzenhofer/overhiring-b966a6ff383d...

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#122

Post by twblalock »

veeralpatel979 wrote: post #112

It's unfortunate that as startups get larger, the speed of improvement on their product often gets slower. It's strange to me that Dropbox has thousands of employees, people have wanted this for a _long_ time, and yet this hasn't been built. You'd think that with more engineering/PM/design talent the product would get better, and faster. Anyone have any insight into why happens? I've never worked at a early stage sta…

The larger a product gets, the risk and customer impact of regressions increases, so even "simple" changes require significant engineering and QA effort. There are also so many feature requests that prioritizing them is a full time job.

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#124

Post by degenerate »

twblalock wrote: post #122
veeralpatel979 wrote: post #112

It's unfortunate that as startups get larger, the speed of improvement on their product often gets slower. It's strange to me that Dropbox has thousands of employees, people have wanted this for a _long_ time, and yet this hasn't been built. You'd think that with more engineering/PM/design talent the product would get better, and faster. Anyone have any insight into why happens? I've never worked at a early stage sta…

The larger a product gets, the risk and customer impact of regressions increases, so even "simple" changes require significant engineering and QA effort. There are also so many feature requests that prioritizing them is a full time job.

That, and, as people move on - their code remains... so part of adding new features means sifting through the codebase to learn what everything does and be very careful not to add new bugs.

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#125

Post by edanm »

b3kart wrote: post #51
marksomnian wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a Node/JavaScript developer, you might want to keep code in Dropbox, but putting node_modules in there will tank it.

Does it not suggest that node_modules in the source directory isn't a good idea to begin with?

It is usually git-ignored, which means it isn't part of the "real" source directory (the one that is shared with other devs). It's a temporary output of the build process, in essence.

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#126

Post by thrower123 »

golergka wrote: post #10
spectaclepiece wrote: post #2

The most requested feature, to allow a file or folder to be ignored by Dropbox sync without using selective sync is finally in beta. The community requested a .dropboxignore file but they chose another solution which I’m sure is reasonable for making the feature more user friendly to non-devs. This will be immensely helpful for node_modules or build target directories.

> This will be immensely helpful for node_modules or build target directories. Why would anyone put a node project in Dropbox to begin with?

I actually do this with my hobby .NET project and OneDrive. It's really a lot nicer when bouncing between two desktops and a laptop when I only have a half hour or an hour to work on something - everything is just there, and I don't have to futz around and check if I need to git pull, or worry if I get interrupted and don't get a chance to push whatever I'm working on.

Of course, NuGet is far less promiscuous than node, and I'm playing with a desktop app, so there's a lot less ephemeral stuff to have to sync.

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#127

Post by idoh »

twblalock wrote: post #122
veeralpatel979 wrote: post #112

It's unfortunate that as startups get larger, the speed of improvement on their product often gets slower. It's strange to me that Dropbox has thousands of employees, people have wanted this for a _long_ time, and yet this hasn't been built. You'd think that with more engineering/PM/design talent the product would get better, and faster. Anyone have any insight into why happens? I've never worked at a early stage sta…

The larger a product gets, the risk and customer impact of regressions increases, so even "simple" changes require significant engineering and QA effort. There are also so many feature requests that prioritizing them is a full time job.

I'd say customer impact, even without regressions. As an example of something that I'm currently working on:

- there is a need to add a single link to a page

- some percentage of the customers will not like this change (perhaps 5%), because it links to a non-whitelabeled area of the product

- as a result, a list of customers that will be upset has to be assembled, and then each one reached out to, which a different department, that doesn't really care if the link is there or not, has to do

I'd say that doing the above will take a month or so. All for a link.

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#128

Post by mrlala »

dropdrive wrote: post #33

Is there any reason to use dropbox over onedrive? This feature has been in onedrive I believe since Windows 10 release? (Also onedrive has linux clients too so- I use it on Linux itself and the linux client by abraunegg supports this)

Oh god.. Onedrive.

First of all, this was about 2-3 years ago.. not sure if things have changed.

(1) Onedrive "for business" was completely different than OneDrive personal. It still worked under some archaic office sharepoint or whatever thing to some degree.. so first when I tried to use it there was some terrible path/file limitation (lower than normal windows) and it didn't like some special symbols.

So let's ignore that nightmare above, maybe it's changed.

(2) Even with onedrive personal and the business version I used.. it COULD NOT manage a lot of files. I mean even 50k-100k files it would just stop working basically. It would just sit there stuck, never do anything etc.

On Dropbox we have well over a million files and it works fine. Some chunk of files change all the time and it still works.

tl;dr if you have a LOT of files.. Dropbox is the way to go- nothing else I have tried comes even close to it.

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#129

Post by treis »

golergka wrote: post #102
kbumsik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put everything in Dropbox including all of my projects. In my experience it works pretty well even if node_modules can't be ignored now. Putting every projects in Dropbox with .git is the most awesome feature of Dropbox. With Dropbox's History and Time Machine feature, you will be almost never able to delete/overwrite your work permanently, even by intention.

Why not just use github, gitlab or other VCS? Personally, I enjoy using Dropbox for music projects (which VCS are not well suited for), but for code... (I apologize if I sound as if I'm telling you what you should be doing; I am really just trying to understand the motivation behind such a decision - but I fully understand that even if something seems bizzare to me, it's just my personal humble uninformed opinion).

>Why not just use github, gitlab or other VCS?

You can only revert changes to states that you have explicitly stored and uploaded. Dropbox does that automatically any time you save a file. That simplicity makes it more reliable. You will never lose anything you saved. And with rewind you can go back to any point in time. The advantage of git comes from its branch/merge features. But for a single developer on a small project that doesn't know git well that's not worht the complexity.

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#130

Post by krsdcbl »

veeralpatel979 wrote: post #112

It's unfortunate that as startups get larger, the speed of improvement on their product often gets slower. It's strange to me that Dropbox has thousands of employees, people have wanted this for a _long_ time, and yet this hasn't been built. You'd think that with more engineering/PM/design talent the product would get better, and faster. Anyone have any insight into why happens? I've never worked at a early stage sta…

I know "we" in the dev community are always eager for improvement, better tooling and often specific features. Many non-dev folks will also sometimes express the need for certain functionality.

But there's one factor that plays a big role in this i think: most people don't like it when somebody changes "their stuff", regardless of possible benefits.

So once a product is well established, tweaking and changing it puts you at quite a risk of annoying or losing some of your aquired userbase, and further development therefore ensues much more prudently and slowly.

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