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An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools

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Re: An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools

#81

Post by mlazos »

logicslave wrote: post #14

Honest opinion on FAANG tools is that the big ones are now antiquated and slowing these big tech companies down. Eventually they will need to rip out all these tools that once gave them an edge and replace them, but they cant bc of how much depends on them, and whala, you have a large failing slow company

New orgs are forming at big companies all the time. In my time at Microsoft, I’ve seen the tooling go from horrible monorepos with perforce to really nice git repos in azure devops. I also don’t think “failing” is the right term for these megacorps. Slow maybe, but even that varies per team.

Re: An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools

#83

Post by timetc »

cobbzilla wrote: post #71
burakemir wrote: post #17

(Googler here) The article is a good description of the tools, and I was not aware of the blaze clones plz and pants. One thing that is maybe not obvious: For an API author, code search in combination with a monorepo and the somewhat hermetic universe which is Google's code base provides immediate access to all uses of a library. You can see what worked well and what didn't, and it enables effective refactorings. Tha…

> code search in combination with a monorepo and the somewhat hermetic universe which is Google's code base provides immediate access to all uses of a library. You can see what worked well and what didn't, and it enables effective refactorings. That also means when writing a client, you can quickly figure out from other client code how stuff is supposed to be used. ... If anything like this were possible for open sou…

A while ago I came across Nx (https://nx.dev/) from Nrwl, which sounds a lot like this. It's open source and has a lot of tooling for managing monorepo's. I think they even worked with Google for it. Altough I think the main focus was JS projects (as far as I know).

Re: An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools

#84

Post by TN1ck »

logicslave wrote: post #18
ponker wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is “whala” an adaptation from the French “voilá” or of a different origin?

Its me not caring about the spelling haha...

Could be confused with "Vallah" though in this case: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Vallah

Re: An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools

#85

Post by beagle3 »

ponker wrote: post #16
logicslave wrote: post #14

Honest opinion on FAANG tools is that the big ones are now antiquated and slowing these big tech companies down. Eventually they will need to rip out all these tools that once gave them an edge and replace them, but they cant bc of how much depends on them, and whala, you have a large failing slow company

Is “whala” an adaptation from the French “voilá” or of a different origin?

Not clear. Look at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wallah#Etymology_2

wallah is arabic slang for "by god"

voila is french for "look there", meaning "just look at that"

They are totally different semantically interjections originally, yet one fits almost everywhere the other does, and if Wiktionary is to be believed, in Danish one is a spelling for the other.

Re: An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools

#86

Post by zrail »

summerlight wrote: post #67
dannyw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say there are lots of smart engineers at non-FAANG companies too; especially engineering-first orgs.

I think what the OP intends is its size and diversity of the talent pool. Obviously, there are so many smart engineers outside FAANG, but it's also true that having world-class experts on cryptography, networking, distributed system, web technologies, machine learning, microprocessor, compiler etc etc... in a single company is something very rare.

I work at a FAAG-adjacent and the single most valuable thing for me personally is being able to hang out in the Slack channel where all the old timers idle. If I need context on something and nobody on my team knows, 9 times out of 10 I can ask there and someone will at least point me in the right direction.

Re: An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools

#87

Post by daralthus »

tdeck wrote: post #11

> Many years ago, I did a brief stint at Google. A lot has changed since then, but even that brief exposure to Google's internal developer tools left a lasting impression on me. Perhaps the operative phrase being "Many years ago". I currently work at Google, previously I worked at Square. Of the two, I generally prefer the OSS and off-the-shelf tooling at Square. Some things really are better at Google (code search a…

> They were probably amazing (and much simpler) tools back in the day, but the world has moved and we're somewhat constrained by what's familiar.

Exactly my feelings about Phabricator. GitLab simply runs circles around it if you consider the issue tracking, CI etc. as part of the problem.

Re: An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools

#88

Post by zcw100 »

The one tool everyone missed was marketing with being able to call yourself an ex-googler being the biggest tool in the toolbox. Let me share the other side of the diaspora (I dislike this term). Tons of former X, pick your popular Silicon Valley company, employees with little else to sell other than that they worked foe x company. The vain CEO hires them hoping that they’ll sprinkle some magic fairy dust on their dysfunctional company. Never mind that the reason it’s disfunction is because the CEO hired his buddy from high school with a degree in poly sci to run things and is having an affair with the head of hr. Our intrepid developer constantly mumbles “we’ll at x we used to do whatever.” Afraid that the CEO will realize that the fairy dust is just a combination of cool aid and glitter starts throwing people under the bus and the knives come out.

Re: An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools

#89

Post by mav3rick »

zcw100 wrote: post #88

The one tool everyone missed was marketing with being able to call yourself an ex-googler being the biggest tool in the toolbox. Let me share the other side of the diaspora (I dislike this term). Tons of former X, pick your popular Silicon Valley company, employees with little else to sell other than that they worked foe x company. The vain CEO hires them hoping that they’ll sprinkle some magic fairy dust on their dy…

Did you even read the article ? It's incredibly well written with pros and cons of each tool. I know you have a hatchet to bury against Google but why don't you read the article first.

Re: An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools

#90

Post by Cthulhu_ »

zcw100 wrote: post #88

The one tool everyone missed was marketing with being able to call yourself an ex-googler being the biggest tool in the toolbox. Let me share the other side of the diaspora (I dislike this term). Tons of former X, pick your popular Silicon Valley company, employees with little else to sell other than that they worked foe x company. The vain CEO hires them hoping that they’ll sprinkle some magic fairy dust on their dy…

I have one experience with that. Guy, late 20's or early 30's at best, ex-Googler joins a bank and becomes CTO. Pushes for them to replace Angular (which they went all in on, migrating from a set of JQuery UI components) with, drumroll, Polymer.

Nothing finished yet, performance issues (because guess what, polymer's routing turned out to be pretty much the same as a 'tab panel'), aaand Polymer 2 rolls around, backwards incompatible. Scramble to make all their components suitable for Polymer 2, and they're just about to sigh a breath of relief aaaaand polymer 3 rolls around and becomes deprecated in favor of lit-html at the same time.

Moral of the story: Ex-Google doesn't mean shit, and don't force the use of experimental technology for your whole fucking multi-billion company.

They should've stuck with Angular, it's fine, or migrate to React instead which has / is becoming an industry standard.

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