141–150 of 462 posts
That is: on hardware from seven years ago and older. Which is an eternity in tech. Since then we've seen incredible new hardware come out (EPYC 2 in 2018 for example).
One can wonder: up to how many MAU could a service scale today, on today's hardware, with a small team? And what about tomorrow's hardware...
This is fascinating.
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Exactly. Facebook bought WhatsApp’s users like cattle on auction. WhatsApp guys just needed the right price offer. Now with pseudo tech posts like the current they are trying to mask it’s public image behind some ancient tech innovation from it’s past…
WA Management was misled by Facebook about what FB wanted to do with WA. I agree that you'd have to pretty naive to believe FB but it's not like WA founders sold solely because of money.
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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 ye…
What is (was?) problematic with Angular is the toxic leadership: https://medium.com/@jeffbcross/jeffs-letter-to-the-angular-t...
But there are great things happening. The wider community has solutions for everything. (For example here's the "reactive forms are not strongly typed" issue [0] that showcases both the good and the bad. The need for this feature has clearly emerged in 2016. People stepped up and a PR was created, but ... basically no signal from the Angular team. Of course using a wrapper was an easy workaround with a distinctly sour taste in the mouth. Then finally something happened and an Angular team member now seems to be working on it in "full steam ahead" mode.)
I recently had to maintain a large React + NestJS application and I was seriously considering organizing a terrorist cell to go back in time and ...
I'm honestly not that surprised about the size. In my experience, efficiency and the number of engineers have not necessarily correlated. For example, I used to work for a company with about 500 employees (relatively large by German standards) and now work for a competing company in the same industry with less than 150 employees. The core engineering team only consists of a dozen engineers. The output is noticeably l…
Heroes are a red flag for me, as a manager, trying to build a resilient team. Which is not to say that you can't have a range of experience levels. But what happens when those heroes are unavailable? Maybe they're out on vacation, or medical leave, or they eventually retire or leave the organization because they're tired of propping it up? Heroes tend to be a single point of failure.
As somebody else mentioned, these companies end up regularly throwing millions at consultant projects that always fail. In other words, they pay a hefty premium for shitty temp "heroes" that give them less than employee heroes would have given them.
You see this a lot in the traditional finance sector, where managers don't appreciate tech workers and relentlessly fuck themselves over trying to save a dime.
"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.
"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'm honestly not that surprised about the size. In my experience, efficiency and the number of engineers have not necessarily correlated. For example, I used to work for a company with about 500 employees (relatively large by German standards) and now work for a competing company in the same industry with less than 150 employees. The core engineering team only consists of a dozen engineers. The output is noticeably l…
Heroes are a red flag for me, as a manager, trying to build a resilient team. Which is not to say that you can't have a range of experience levels. But what happens when those heroes are unavailable? Maybe they're out on vacation, or medical leave, or they eventually retire or leave the organization because they're tired of propping it up? Heroes tend to be a single point of failure.
Every strength is a weakness, and every weakness is a strength. IME, heroes are no more a red flag than pretending that good engineers are interchangeable. It depends on the context.
The expected outcomes of these teams are different, and that’s OK. If you’re a very small company and don’t have a couple heroes, you won’t build anything important. If you’re a very big company, the heroes that built it left years ago, and you need resiliency more than new heroes (unless the business is going sideways and needs saving).
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I wouldn't say JavaScript is exotic, it's more to do with what is being done with it. Traditionally it was used to enhance HTML pages with some DOM manipulation but it's now being used for a million other things too. So historically, if your JavaScript code broke your page would still render as it was just html but now there are all sorts of build processes and long chains that use JavaScript to create the html in th…
JavaScript has matured massively over the past 10 years. I'm not a Node developer myself, but JS + TS is a very palatable combination to me. I'd pick it over many other languages. 10 years ago I would not have touched JS unless I was forced.
I'd be interested to know which ones, because I can't think of one advantage that Javascript has - aside from the ubiquity of browsers. If we're comparing any other aspect of it though, I just don't know what advantage it has (seriously).
What is amazing to me is that they did scale to 400 million monthly active users with less than 50 engineers... In 2014. That is: on hardware from seven years ago and older. Which is an eternity in tech. Since then we've seen incredible new hardware come out (EPYC 2 in 2018 for example). One can wonder: up to how many MAU could a service scale today, on today's hardware, with a small team? And what about tomorrow's h…
What I'm saying is that for the general case of "scaling with few engineers", it seems to me that the tools available matter a lot more than the specifics of what hardware is available at the time. Launching an international service "from scratch" with a small team and a modest budget just wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago, but not because CPUs were too slow.
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> 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?
But if you choose technology for its intrinsic merits you attract engineers with taste, who have the drive and luxury to care about their work on a different level.
There are plenty more people who can't be arsed to or don't have the time or simply don't find it valuable enough to adopt "niche" technology, despite technical merits.
I don't think it has anything to do with smarts, but rather with priorities and human nature. Most people follow the mainstream because they favor stability and convention, those who break out in different directions favor autonomy and freedom.