11–20 of 462 posts
Would be good to actually hear from one of these engineers for a discussion on the paint points of working on WhatsApp back then.
I wonder if WhatsApp could be considered the most successful user-facing application with an Erlang backend.
WhatsApp is a spy app of Facebook nowadays
That was its fate anyway. Some things just can't really make money unless they do it in scummy ways (or we haven't found a viable alternative or a way to protect them). Public instant messengers, public forums, public file hosting, public image hosting.
Assuming a 20% vat, that’s $800M in yearly revenue. If you spend $500k per engineer per year, you’re still left with $775M to handle infrastructure and all other expenses.
Whatsapp would have been sustainable without fb. That’s the regret.
This is good news for the developers, the product owners and the customers.
I still can't understand why today people choose a (Javascript) stack of build systems, ton of dependencies, and all kinds of exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped. As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a nightmare later.
I have seen days go to waste because of Docker misconfigurations, problems with dependency versions, outdated dependencies not available anymore, bugs deep down in an unknown dependencies, and so on. Personally I want to build systems. I don't want to spend my day debugging all kinds of weird problems.
The (old) WhatsApp teams sounds like a great workplace.
This article does very little to explain how they did that. It basically states the type of tech they used (Erlang, FreeBSD and SoftLayer), and something about not trying to over engineer stuff. The title also makes it sound like 500 engineers would make it easier to scale up WhatsApp, which does not make too much sense either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was its fate anyway. Some things just can't really make money unless they do it in scummy ways (or we haven't found a viable alternative or a way to protect them). Public instant messengers, public forums, public file hosting, public image hosting.
Whatsapp used to charge 1 eur or usd per year per user. Assuming a 20% vat, that’s $800M in yearly revenue. If you spend $500k per engineer per year, you’re still left with $775M to handle infrastructure and all other expenses. Whatsapp would have been sustainable without fb. That’s the regret.
Some of these points are a bit suspicious, and I bet don't tell "the whole story" the way they're intended. For instance, the statement about not investing in automation unless absolutely necessary or the point about hot-swapping Erlang code. Would be good to actually hear from one of these engineers for a discussion on the paint points of working on WhatsApp back then.
I think this XKCD applies: https://xkcd.com/1205/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was its fate anyway. Some things just can't really make money unless they do it in scummy ways (or we haven't found a viable alternative or a way to protect them). Public instant messengers, public forums, public file hosting, public image hosting.
Whatsapp used to charge 1 eur or usd per year per user. Assuming a 20% vat, that’s $800M in yearly revenue. If you spend $500k per engineer per year, you’re still left with $775M to handle infrastructure and all other expenses. Whatsapp would have been sustainable without fb. That’s the regret.