151–160 of 462 posts
The many comments alluding to the technical challenge of building a chat app with 50 engineers being relatively easy are forgetting that scaling said chat app to 1 billion users is absolutely not easy and a function of more than just the engineering quality and technical challenge. There's MUCH more to a successful product than engineering...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This seems tendentious. Which average user was looking for these changes? Can you point to a site that shifted to an "app-like experience" and became successful because of it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.…
Why do you compare it to Rust though? JS is as old as Java, however its ecosystem seems to be much less mature (at least from outside). I haven't touched Java for 15 years, but I am fairly confident that people still use Apache Ant as build system. Every time I try to peak into JS world, it appears similar to tiktok trends in terms of how quickly people move from one thing to another.
As in: there are still (older) projects around that haven't (yet) migrated away from Ant? Sure.
As in: Ant is still the go-to build system or at least still commonly used? No, not at all. When I create a new Java project in IntelliJ for example, I can choose between Maven and Gradle as the build system. Ant isn't even offered as an option.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how this is related. Server-side you write and expose an API. Then you have 1-3 developers for each platform that write code that consumes that API. Those developers don't need to know anything about the internals of the server.
I wish that WhatsApp could make a public API. I'm very thankful that Facebook is integrating WhatsApp into their services, because that gives me hope that a true web interface will be developed. For me, it takes between 10 hours (worst case) to 5 minutes (best case) to open WhatsApp. My iPhone 4S is too old, so opening WhatsApp gives a message "This version of WhatsApp ha..., Update WhatsApp, Your update will be free…
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.
However, you can reduce the risk through good documentation, good engineering practices and so on. As long as you are aware that the team is partly made up of heroes, you can prepare accordingly. So as a manager, I can try to ensure that a few heroes keep productivity high while making sure that the rest of the team understands the basics of the system through things like code review and the like. In the worst case, a teammate can then at least get up to speed quickly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The client is another story, but for the server they forked ejabberd which is a reliable, established XMPP server. So they probably had "fast-cheap-secure" on the server-side, because 6 years had been spent ironing out ejabberd bugs before the first version of Whatsapp came out. My understanding is that vulns in Whatsapp so far were client-side, but i'm interested if i missed some on the server side.
They had some homebrew encryption and authentication before, see eg https://blog.thijsalkema.de/blog/2013/10/08/piercing-through... https://blog.thijsalkema.de/blog/2013/10/08/piercing-through...
What could possibly go wrong? :)
Thanks for the links!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how this is related. Server-side you write and expose an API. Then you have 1-3 developers for each platform that write code that consumes that API. Those developers don't need to know anything about the internals of the server.
I wish that WhatsApp could make a public API. I'm very thankful that Facebook is integrating WhatsApp into their services, because that gives me hope that a true web interface will be developed. For me, it takes between 10 hours (worst case) to 5 minutes (best case) to open WhatsApp. My iPhone 4S is too old, so opening WhatsApp gives a message "This version of WhatsApp ha..., Update WhatsApp, Your update will be free…
"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
Too bad I can't even remember the last time I jumped on a project with less than 80 dependencies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how this is related. Server-side you write and expose an API. Then you have 1-3 developers for each platform that write code that consumes that API. Those developers don't need to know anything about the internals of the server.
I wish that WhatsApp could make a public API. I'm very thankful that Facebook is integrating WhatsApp into their services, because that gives me hope that a true web interface will be developed. For me, it takes between 10 hours (worst case) to 5 minutes (best case) to open WhatsApp. My iPhone 4S is too old, so opening WhatsApp gives a message "This version of WhatsApp ha..., Update WhatsApp, Your update will be free…
https://faq.whatsapp.com/web/download-and-installation/how-t...