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Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

engineering.fb.com

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Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#81

Post by julosflb »

edhelas wrote: post #58
lancesells wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you could add Twitter and New Reddit to the list as well.

In France we have a Craiglist-like website. They recently moved to ReactJS : https://www.leboncoin.fr/ The website features didn't changed in between. It's basically a pagination + a search based on radius (so DB related) + name (so DB related) + categories (so DB related). The complete website could be build in pure HTML + CSS and a bit of JS + Ajax to refresh parts of it. But no, it's build with ReactJS, and it tak…

Could not agree more. It is barely usable now. The exact opposite of the original spirit. A complete failure.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#82

Post by nromiun »

bzb3 wrote: post #65
edhelas wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone have 4G and Fiber, and a Core i7 and 16Gb of RAM :) Seriously…

That's not what I've said, and I somewhat agree with the original point, but this trend of wanting to cater to the lowest denominator rubs me the wrong way. Some guys think the web should be usable with a 50€ smartphone on GPRS, and I say no, because there's a middle ground.

How about just caring for the real world instead of the numbers provided by the internet provider? Those download numbers are for the best case scenario. And unlike broadband 4G is not reliable at all.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#83

Post by JoshuaDavid »

edhelas wrote: post #50
tambourine_man wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I won’t take blame for that. Still haven’t found a use case for React/Angular or SASS/whatever. If I’m guilty of something is not recognizing the validity of those tools, as I’m sure there are. But 2MB CSS is simply inconceivable to me.

Big +1. I would be really interested to find one, only ONE, website where React/Angular was really bringing a better experience and better final product than a standard pure JS with simple Ajax system.

I've used react for internal administrative tools for configuring UI, and the ability to do a real-time preview of what the UI will look like based on how you've configured it is pretty useful. Also used it a number of times to build form inputs that aren't natively supported ("list of objects all with the same properties where you can select and make a change to a bunch at once" sort of thing).

Basically I've found that if you're doing something useful which could be done with jquery but would probably have had subtle bugs due to a combinatorial explosion of possible states, you can usually use react in that context to make a cleaner, faster, and less buggy version of that same UI that is faster to develop and easier to reason about (and thus better for the end user, since software that works consistently is more valuable than software that mostly works as long as you don't breathe wrong near it).

If you're looking for examples where a single-page app is better than server-side-rendered HTML with some javascript sprinkled in to make certain components more interactive, though, I can't help you. The successful use cases I've seen for react are of the "use it as the way you sprinkle additional functionality into your server-side-rendered HTML" type.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#84

Post by tambourine_man »

Kaze404 wrote: post #56
edhelas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big +1. I would be really interested to find one, only ONE, website where React/Angular was really bringing a better experience and better final product than a standard pure JS with simple Ajax system.

What makes you think React/Angular are products to increase user experience? Of course you won't find that, they are tools for developers to streamline development and make maintenance easier. Have you worked on a platform that uses nothing but pure JS and fetch calls? I have, and there's no way to make sense of a project that has to deal with so many things.

>they are tools for developers to streamline development and make maintenance easier.

I'm not convinced they are successful at that either.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#85

Post by _jal »

starpilot wrote: post #30
raphaelj wrote: post #19

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

Comments like these remind of an old post on Slashdot, "What makes a good website?" Ask "geeks" what they prefer, it's usually minimalism, no images, consistent text styling. In the end, the ideal format becomes a text file without markup. I think we need to accept the opinions of techies are increasingly irrelevant in tech. It's like being fine artist getting paid to design flyers or a chef making burgers.

First, that's just wrong.

"Geeks", as a class, will tend to focus on technical issues before aesthetic ones. Looking at that fact and immediately equating it to an absurd extreme is a fun game, if you don't care about describing reality. I know some accomplished engineers who are also good designers, and vice-versa.

Second, if my professional opinions are not being taken seriously, that usually means one of two things: I'm too far out over my skis, or am in the wrong place with the wrong people. Especially so if you feel like a chef making burgers.

Of course, if "in total control" and "irrelevant" are the only two states of being one sees, I suppose I see how you get there.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#87

Post by laggyluke »

core-questions wrote: post #20
gfodor wrote: post #4

This is 100% incidental complexity. It's painful to consider that this level of sophisticated engineering is needed to render a website quickly in 2020. What went wrong? I'm personally excited about things like turbolinks and phoenix liveview, which may provide a path out of this mess.

Facebook rendered just fine a decade ago. What changed between now and then, in terms of actual improvement to end user experience, to make it so slow this kind of crap is needed? My guess is: - Desire to offload more processing to end user machines to save compute - More and more ads and user analytics in order to pick which ads to show - More engineers that irrationally hate the simplicity of PHP Duct tape on top o…

> Duct tape on top of abstractions on top of duct tape in order to make a document platform behave like an application platform. Isn't it time to just replace web browsers with something that doesn't suck?

Be careful what you wish for. You just described native mobile apps.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#88

Post by pier25 »

bzb3 wrote: post #65
edhelas wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone have 4G and Fiber, and a Core i7 and 16Gb of RAM :) Seriously…

That's not what I've said, and I somewhat agree with the original point, but this trend of wanting to cater to the lowest denominator rubs me the wrong way. Some guys think the web should be usable with a 50€ smartphone on GPRS, and I say no, because there's a middle ground.

> because there's a middle ground

So where's your middle ground?

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#89

Post by Groxx »

gfodor wrote: post #48
dimitrisnl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...but it's not a website. It doesn't list 10 cars, 1 family photo and the address on the footer.

take a screenshot of facebook - it's a website.

I can run Linux in my browser. Is Linux a website? https://bellard.org/jslinux/

You have to draw the line somewhere, or it becomes meaningless.

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