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WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

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Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#101

Post by emerongi »

bjarneh wrote: post #64
mrweasel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Yet people seem to focus on the technology, because that's more easily replicated, and easier to accept, in my opinion. I think you are correct. It also works as some sort of advertisement. Others feel like they made the right tech choices, if they choose the same tech as WhatsApp or Spotify. Completely forgetting that they probably need to be somewhat proficient in Erlang to get the benefits from the language etc.…

Language choice does act as a filter, though. If you choose Erlang, do you get smarter developers by default?

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#102

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

tdrdt wrote: post #16

"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…

> 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.

So the same cannot be said for "newer" languages like Rust, Go, and other's whose ecosystems and paradigms aren't completely fleshed out yet?

This comment reeks of someone who is looking from the outside in when it comes to building stuff in JS. Most comments I see criticizing JS stacks are so superficial and demeaning that's its obvious the commenters have little to no experience working in JS.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#103

Post by southerntofu »

topdancing wrote: post #73

You can very easily build your own WhatsApp server today by simply deploying https://www.ejabberd.im/ on a box and using https://conversations.im/ on an Android phone.

Why is this being downvoted? Whatsapp is notoriously "just" a highly-optimized fork of ejabberd [0]. ejabberd is written in Erlang/OTP which enables quasi-horizontal scaling and amazing failure recovery, along with incredible uptime.

What's different about Whatsapp compared to a traditional XMPP experience is:

- it uses a single centralized server, without federating

- it uses phone numbers as identifiers instead of nicknames

- it has a tightly integrated (closed-source) client

So you can not only "build your own WhatsApp", but also federate with others doing the same, which is pretty cool and prevents a single actor from abusing the whole network.

[0] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/whatsapp-scalability/

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#104

Post by goodoldneon »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #99
tdrdt wrote: post #16

"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.

You’re fine — don’t listen to JS haters on Hacker News. They pine for the simpler days of sites that primarily use HTML and CSS, with maybe a little bit of JS sprinkled in. But consumers are increasingly demanding an app-like experience from the web, which requires JS frameworks.

As for Express, JS on the backend will be popular as long as JS on the frontend is popular. JS backends have their flaws, but there’s a lot of value in using the same language in the browser and server.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#105

Post by Cthulhu_ »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #99
tdrdt wrote: post #16

"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.

Yes, but you'll find that a lot of work becomes maintenance of older systems, and less new and shiny things.

I do think the 'craze' of new frameworks popping up left and right quieted down some years ago, and things have roughly settled on React, Vue, maybe Angular (which lost a lot of its shine after the Angular 2 announcement fiasco), etc.

For a new application, I picked React + Go because I'm confident that ten years down the line it will still be maintainable - although, Go moreso than the front-end, which doesn't feel nearly as solid and stable.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#106

Post by askonomm »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #99
tdrdt wrote: post #16

"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.

JS is everywhere though. You even have parasitic languages that compile to JS (ClojureScript, TypeScript, etc). You got Node and also Deno for back-end stuff with support for multithreading. Concequently, JS is among the most popular, and most used languages.

I do admit the ecosystem needs to find a way to have more stability, because NPM outdated package tree nightmare is pretty bad, but I guess that's what you get with an industry that moves so fast, so in that case it's up to you as a developer to not use too many dependencies.

Anyway this is all to say I don't think JS is going anywhere for the next 10 years.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#107

Post by yen223 »

tdrdt wrote: post #16

"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…

WhatsApp was built on Erlang and FreeBSD, which feels way more exotic to me

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#108

Post by antihero »

tdrdt wrote: post #16

"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…

> exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped

See whilst obviously the JS ecosystem is quite volatile and can be trend-based, I think there are benefits - the language breeds innovation. Innovation doesn't always make the correct choices, and some tech-conservativism is important in many types of companies. But if our ancestors had just been lazy and just stuck with what was known and good, we'd never even had computers in the first place.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#109

Post by AshamedCaptain »

southerntofu wrote: post #103
topdancing wrote: post #73

You can very easily build your own WhatsApp server today by simply deploying https://www.ejabberd.im/ on a box and using https://conversations.im/ on an Android phone.

Why is this being downvoted? Whatsapp is notoriously "just" a highly-optimized fork of ejabberd [0]. ejabberd is written in Erlang/OTP which enables quasi-horizontal scaling and amazing failure recovery, along with incredible uptime. What's different about Whatsapp compared to a traditional XMPP experience is: - it uses a single centralized server, without federating - it uses phone numbers as identifiers instead of…

Doesn't anybody remember how literally Whatsapp's founder wrote on one of the ejabberd mailing lists with something like "I just installed the server, please help me configure authentication" or the like?

Retrospectively that has always colored my perception of how relevant technical aspects are for a successful startup (i.e. not much). Marketing (and viral, user-capturing & monopolist practices) are (sadly) much more important.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#110

Post by southerntofu »

varispeed wrote: post #79

I bet these engineers got only a tiny tiny fraction of the billions of revenue. It always fascinates me how in the engineers' mind it reconciles that their work brings corporations they work for billions and yet they have to rent a tiny apartment for a substantial portion of their salary and otherwise lead a pretty average life. Then going to lavish offices witnessing how the money they could make use of is wasted on…

That's the founding principle of capitalism: private property.

People living someplace don't own it, and people working some field don't own it. Some "owner" owns the land and means of production and extracts value from people doing the actual work.

Yes, it's a deeply broken system. A slightly better system revolves around self-organized workers coop where everyone gets equal pay and there are no shares to hold (or everyone owns the same amount). An even better system abolishes money and private property so that people can live meaningful/useful lives without worrying about imaginary numbers ruining their entire existence.

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