...the other 450 engineers are just for spying and tracking people
WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
91–100 of 462 posts
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#92This just makes more clear that we didn't try enough creating an open-source instant messaging app that respects our privacy as it should be. It's probably much more difficult to do the same thing as WhatsApp did because of the dependency we created around it but I think we just need the right initiative to do so.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#93Chat is the number 1 toy problem that is explained in every Erlang book out there.
Therefore, honestly I'm not really surprised to see 50 engineers capable of building a product around it.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#94"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." 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 n…
Well, WhatsApp had to support exotic cases like BlackBerry, Symbian OS (Nokia), and Windows Phone. I will say, dealing with JS stacks, seems easy in comparison to mobile fragmentation from back then.
And JAVA ME (formerly J2ME). The worst of the mobile fragmentation by far.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#95This just makes more clear that we didn't try enough creating an open-source instant messaging app that respects our privacy as it should be. It's probably much more difficult to do the same thing as WhatsApp did because of the dependency we created around it but I think we just need the right initiative to do so.
There are several hard problems linked to what people really mean when they say privacy.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#96"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." 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 n…
A static React site, an Express backend, and a REST API is hardly exotic
Seems redundant to have a Express backend + REST API, why can't you just build your REST API on the Express backend?
And also, React is complex, hardly anyone seems to know the internals. The API interface might be easy to learn, but "simple" is not something that you should label React with.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#97This 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.
The technology stack isn't even that relevant. There have been a few different articles about WhatsApp and their 1B users with only 50 engineers. The key in previous articles was that WhatsApp hired really smart people. Having extremely talented engineers and a rather small scope is what allowed them to grow til 1B users, with a minimum staff. Yet people seem to focus on the technology, because that's more easily rep…
I think the technology stack they choose is highly relevant to their success.
The choice of Erlang was crucial: it's basically built for communications and has all pesky issues like version updating, resilience to failure and scalability already taken care of by nature of its architecture and framework.
Of course, these 50 engineers were smart, most in that specialised space are, but I strongly doubt that they could have achieved the reliability and scalability of what made the success of WhatsApp with a PHP or Ruby back-end without more complexity, more ressouces and more hardware (like what FB and Twitter had to go through).
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#98"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." 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 n…
Docker isn't itself the problem. It's people who insist on `latest` et al.
Docker itself can provide a stable backbone that allows you to run repeatable and predictable builds.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#99"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." 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 n…
Honest question, is specializing in a JS stack bad in terms of career prospects? I've been using express + react/vuejs professionally for a couple of years and I wonder if it'll be in demand in the next 10-15 years.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#100This just makes more clear that we didn't try enough creating an open-source instant messaging app that respects our privacy as it should be. It's probably much more difficult to do the same thing as WhatsApp did because of the dependency we created around it but I think we just need the right initiative to do so.
It is hard to get the general public to care about privacy when they post pictures of every meal and share every thought and emotion they have with no filter.