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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

#181

Post by RNCTX »

yen223 wrote: post #107
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

FreeBSD was a more stable/mature platform to build on when WhatsApp was designed, particularly in terms of network performance.

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

#182

Post by dunefox »

bjarneh wrote: post #49
willejs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres a high scalability post from years ago that has a bit more information. http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...

Thanks, it does seem like choosing a language that was made for doing things in parallel to begin with was a good idea. To be honest, I've always felt that programming in functional languages creates less bugs, but perhaps that's just my imagination.

It certainly creates fewer bugs of a specific nature, depending on the language.

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

#183

Post by LeifCarrotson »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #162
jawns wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The worst team is the one with a single point of failure. All hell breaks loose if they're unavailable. This makes me wonder why managers have teams like this?

Not all managers have a primary concern of "trying to build a resilient team".

Sometimes, the #1 goal is building a high-performance and/or high-quality product. Lack of team resilience, (temporary) downtime, risk of project failure due to an insufficient bus factor...they're all not good things, but they can be compromised in the pursuit of that goal.

If you want high resilience as well as high performance and also high quality, well, you should go work at NASA, and hope that the Senate works out their budget issues...

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

#184

Post by dunefox »

tantalor wrote: post #151
12ian34 wrote: post #113

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...

... such as? Don't leave us hanging!

I'd imagine getting the users in the first place. That has nothing to do with engineering quality and scaling up, though.

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

#185

Post by globular-toast »

oblio wrote: post #5
kosolam wrote: post #3

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.

Whatsapp is built on a massive, mature, global system specifically designed for sending messages. It's sad that it needs to exist and even more sad that it has to "make money" for someone. Aren't we already paying for our internet connexion/phone bill? Why do we need to be used by Whatsapp just to utilise it for its most basic purpose?

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

#186

Post by leeoniya »

illegalmemory wrote: post #174
jawns wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

5 heros on vacation for 7 days, and coming back and finishing the work in next 5 days is more comfortable position than 50 clueless engineers claiming work will be over in 4 days.

hmm, not sure how many customers would be okay with 7 days of downtime, for instance.

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

#187

Post by sacado2 »

brigandish wrote: post #148
emerongi wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pick it over many other languages. 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).

Typescript has a pretty cool type system. A mixture of dynamic and static typing. You can be as dynamic as with js (or python), or stricter than Java (you can state a reference cannot be null for instance), or anything in between (and have dynamic parts and static parts in the same program).

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

#188

Post by onion2k »

vp8989 wrote: post #163
jawns wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being replaceable tends to make work less satisfying. All the places I've worked at that followed your advice had the most churn and the least productivity/ROI on engineering $ spent.

Being replaceable tends to make work less satisfying.

In my experience the opposite is true. My personal goal on any project is to make myself replaceable. There's nothing I find more tedious than having to work on the same thing for years because no one else can take over from me.

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

#189

Post by michaelt »

chenmike wrote: post #168
brigandish wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But consumers are increasingly demanding an app-like experience from the web 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?

This is a strange way to phrase the question. Sites that had to shift to app-like experiences are hard to find, because nowadays pretty much every web app is an app-like experience from the beginning and is created with a JS framework. The shift happened years ago. Barring informational sites like blogs and news publications, it’s actually more challenging to come up with new web products that are NOT app-like in nat…

Depends how you define 'app-like experience'

If I start with 1990s ebay, does it become app-like when I add the ability to zoom images without a pageload? When I add a WYSIWYG listing editor? When I let people drag and drop images into their listings? When I add JS infinite scrolling to search results? When I add AJAX search autocomplete?

Or do I have to go as far as Google Docs, re-implementing copy/paste functions, taking over the mouse wheel, and adding my own text highlighting and zoom implementations?

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

#190

Post by dunefox »

mrweasel wrote: post #67
alanfranz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could also easily have had different pricing based on location. Requiring EU and US users to pay €5 per year, while have perhaps just €0,25 in Asia, and free in Africa. If you can't get someone to pay €5/$5 per year for a service they use every single day, then there's something really wrong in how we as users think about the service we use every day.

> If you can't get someone to pay €5/$5 per year for a service they use every single day, then there's something really wrong in how we as users think about the service we use every day.

Which is absolutely the case with most people and recurring payments, even with one time payments. If Signal costed money (even 1-2$), I could not have convinced even 10% of the people I got over to Signal - recurring or one time.

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