Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

quastor.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 462 posts

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

#431

Post by unsungNovelty »

moralestapia wrote: post #392
unsungNovelty wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founders hearts were in the right place. Brian Acton created Signal Foundation and Jan Koum like I said also have done good things. They also tried the paid version for a while if you remember. And they were also dead against ads on the app. Unless I missed something or if I am wrong somewhere (At which point I would love to be corrected), Selling was the plan all along doesn't seem like a right observation.

>The founders hearts were in the right place. Brian Acton created Signal Foundation and Jan Koum like I said also have done good things. I'm not saying they are bad people, and selling is not a bad thing either. I'm just pointing out that selling was the plan all along. The WhatsApp story that gets told regularly (like in this instance) is a story of how such few employees and such small infrastructure is enough to b…

This is a good point of view and this is entirely possible. But from an employee POV, FB was touted the best place to work. Things like that would've been a reason to select.

There is another chance that FB was seen as the lesser evil compared to Google then, who was also in the bidding for Whatsapp IIRC. My younger self would've chosen FB instead of Google for sure.

Not to mention, people wouldn't have guessed how horrible FB would turn out to be.

Edit: Funnily enough, after I wrote this comment, It became clear that money was definitely a factor.

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

#432

Post by bjarneh »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #298
bjarneh wrote: post #9

This 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.

Hey, Author of the article here. Totally agreed. Apologies for that! The article isn't really "an article" but it's an email newsletter I send out. I'm quite surprised to see it on the frontpage of HN lol. So what you're reading is one of my emails. It's meant to be more of a summary with additional links to sources where people can read more if they're interested (emailing people long-form articles doesn't work well…

OK, I guess any post on this site is dissected a bit too much - looking for insight that was sometimes never even meant to be there. It is usually a good thing, as we expect anything making it to the front page of HN to contain some profound knowledge. Sometimes a popular title referring to an interesting topic can gain a lot of up-votes as well, and then the criticism can be harsh :-)

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

#433

Post by y4mi »

jpgvm wrote: post #204
y4mi wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS is as old as java, but they're both talking about the build process of JS. in the beginning, JS wasn't really transcoded/compiled. The first time i personally found out about that was sometime after 2010 with coffeescript, not sure if there were preceeding examples. and your claim that people move around is really false. React has been the defacto standard for a pretty long time at this point. yes, other UI librar…

I don't think anyone really has strong opinions about JS on the frontend. It seems relatively fit for purpose there. Most contention I have seen is around attempting to apply it outside the browser. That path only seems to lead to misery.

But js backend has been even more stable with express being the defacto standard since the beginning...

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

#434

Post by numair »

6sp wrote: post #415
numair wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s comical that all of the replies to what you’ve written claim you’re wrong, because you’re actually 100% right. And this is even more true when you remember that the company had fewer than 20 people for a long time, and that there was only one real goal , that seems to be forgotten: they needed to clone BlackBerry Messenger and get it working on every platform possible. That was it. That’s all they needed to do,…

Mike might have taken longer to get it than Jim but he eventually understood the existential threat they faced. He realized this at a time they could have possibly changed course but was unable to do so because the board did not have faith in such a drastic change. The plan to cannibalize device sales today vs promise of future software revenue did not sound so promising for the board, who I imagine were interested o…

Mike wasted a ton of my time, and squandered the opportunity to use the brain trust of Facebook insiders, including the guy who designed Facebook, who I assembled to jump ship and build a new future on top of BBM.

A few months later he sent me a message letting me know his private jet had just landed in Palo Alto... Did he want me to be proud of the fact that he seemed to be selling out all of RIM’s IP to Zuckerberg? I never got what that was about.

Both of Mike and Jim were in over their heads. And too arrogant to let people younger and smarter operate the ship. A tale as old as time itself. I’ll write about this in detail at some point, I promise.

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

#435

Post by anshumankmr »

ehPReth wrote: post #274
rdsubhas wrote: post #249

My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leaders are desperate to try out. Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers. WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long),…

no iPad app either :/

The WABetaInfo account on Twitter said one is finally coming. And I think it seems likely considering we don't need the phone to be on while using Whatsapp Web.

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

#436

Post by RNCTX »

seanw444 wrote: post #206
RNCTX wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is the implication that FreeBSD is less mature now, intended? I'm assuming not. The BSDs have grown in popularity significantly in the last couple years.

No, but there are signs of distress, IMO. I think their decline in usage has resulted in a decline in port maintainers, which is a bigger deal now that systemd is the default on Linux for so many things.

In the 32 bit days it wasn’t hard to get most Linux binaries to run, now it’s virtually impossible for an end user to do on their own.

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

#437

Post by that_guy_iain »

relaxing wrote: post #344
that_guy_iain wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different product. One is a social media network and one is a messaging app.

You say that now, but Twitter also began as a way to send a quick message to your friends.

Umm it quickly pivoted to being a social networking site. Before they even were trying to scale they were a social network, micro blogging site.

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

#438

Post by jpgvm »

y4mi wrote: post #433
jpgvm wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone really has strong opinions about JS on the frontend. It seems relatively fit for purpose there. Most contention I have seen is around attempting to apply it outside the browser. That path only seems to lead to misery.

But js backend has been even more stable with express being the defacto standard since the beginning...

Express isn't a framework though, maybe a "micro-framework". The nearest competitor to real frameworks like ASP.NET or Spring is Nest.js and it's definitely not got the same longevity as those stalwarts.

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

#439

Post by lhnz »

brigandish wrote: post #422
tolgerias wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Functions are first class. Async i/o by default. Familiar syntax (I'm sure Haskell or Clojure are better languages, but they sure take some time to get used to. You can be fairly productive in js in very little time). There are packages for anything you can think of, no need to reinvent the wheel most of the times. And I even like it's single threaded nature. Being able to keep a process waiting without needing to sp…

Firstly, thank you for answering. I think most people would be too defensive (devs are a touchy lot:) to bother or just dismiss my sincere question. I'm going to disagree though (quite gently, I hope:) > Functions are first class. Always a good thing to have in a language but I struggle to think of a language that doesn't have this now. Java has it, C#, Python… if a language is being developed and didn't have it then…

  > I think the driving force of the move to Javascript 
  > everywhere was because devs were tired of learning at
  > least three languages [...] Companies love it because 
  > of fungibility [...]
  > 
  > Perhaps I've just got used to keeping several languages in my head?
Another possibility that doesn't involve you being smarter than everybody in the room is that many people that were capable of learning several languages saw that the majority of companies wouldn't care for this and instead would prefer to hire for a fungible language. They specialised in this language and then used their free time to learn other skills so they could become more valuable in the marketplace.

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

#440

Post by bennysomething »

rdsubhas wrote: post #249

My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leaders are desperate to try out. Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers. WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long),…

And then I look at Dropbox and wonder why they ve made the product into a bloated mess that can't get some basic things right.
Post reply on HN