71–80 of 151 posts
I have a counter example. Founder of a very successful startup (early 2000's) once told me that they first built the technology (adding tracing to Java apps at run-time) just because it was interesting, without any clue if it can be useful to someone. Later they showed it to everyone and they got their first customer who agreed to try it (it required modification to JRE).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's somebody's blog post that's passing by and will be gone tomorrow. I don't think we have to worry about it being overly "elevated". On the other hand we have a bunch of people spending too much time on hacker news, often with all the insight of someone who spent 5 minutes scanning a wikipedia article. I'd worry a lot more about the long term effects of elevating this self congratulatory content, but where's this…
Blog is already inaccessible at this moment.
Is there any evidence that Google is actually better at software engineering than other companies? IMHO, it seems they have enough money to deliberately do things inefficiently which would kill a smaller company, but Google can manage to succeed through brute force. Honestly I think the better example would be from a tiny company that can't afford to do things wrong.
Is there any evidence that Google is actually better at software engineering than other companies? IMHO, it seems they have enough money to deliberately do things inefficiently which would kill a smaller company, but Google can manage to succeed through brute force. Honestly I think the better example would be from a tiny company that can't afford to do things wrong.
I have only worked at a few companies, and I won't comment about the quality of engineering done at Google, but Google's Engineering Systems are the best I have ever used. From Code Search to Critique to Cider (Online IDE) to Blaze (Build) to having the entire code base "mounted" on my dev machine and the integration with golinks, it was an absolute pleasure to work with.
What could have been... [1] Yes, I'm still bitter about it after all those years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TrueTime and spanner definitely fall in the wow category at least for me Microsoft one of the worlds top software companies couldn’t keep up with chrome. There are a lot of projects that look easy at a POC stage and are very different at million of users, millions of tps, millions of TB or full featured
Chrome was released in 2008. Microsoft is doing fine with Edge, though it's a moot point because Microsoft is even older and more sluggish than Google. Spanner seems a prototypical Google dev product though; it's only invented to serve Google. I don't think any of their solutions is the de facto choice in any tech stack.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's somebody's blog post that's passing by and will be gone tomorrow. I don't think we have to worry about it being overly "elevated". On the other hand we have a bunch of people spending too much time on hacker news, often with all the insight of someone who spent 5 minutes scanning a wikipedia article. I'd worry a lot more about the long term effects of elevating this self congratulatory content, but where's this…
Blog is already inaccessible at this moment.
Anyways, Addy Osmani did contribute or did talked a lot about Frontend engineering development, especially wrt to Google Chrome. Whenever I think of Lighthouse, or try to debug or get my team to debug with Google Inspector, I remember him. I have read a lot of his articles, public tweets (I think) where I have exclaimed "oh! That's how", "ah! that is cool."
Is there any evidence that Google is actually better at software engineering than other companies? IMHO, it seems they have enough money to deliberately do things inefficiently which would kill a smaller company, but Google can manage to succeed through brute force. Honestly I think the better example would be from a tiny company that can't afford to do things wrong.
I have only worked at a few companies, and I won't comment about the quality of engineering done at Google, but Google's Engineering Systems are the best I have ever used. From Code Search to Critique to Cider (Online IDE) to Blaze (Build) to having the entire code base "mounted" on my dev machine and the integration with golinks, it was an absolute pleasure to work with.
My impression is that this is a result of a policy that google3 never touches a developer machine, which of course means you can't disconnect and work from a log cabin in the woods. Really sounds like bending yourself around an antipattern to be honest.
> Start with the User Experience and work backwards to the technology you need. I have a counter example. Founder of a very successful startup (early 2000's) once told me that they first built the technology (adding tracing to Java apps at run-time) just because it was interesting, without any clue if it can be useful to someone. Later they showed it to everyone and they got their first customer who agreed to try it…
This post is the perfect example. It lacks an original premise, a unique sense of language, or an understanding of the relationship between incident and narrative. Most of its core ideas are hokum: 'I think it was the immortal Steve Jobs who said "don't worry about getting wet, just dance in the rain"'.
But Google isn't a writing company. You could work there for a hundred years and never gain the ability to write anything worth reading. There's no evidence that the experience produces unique literary insight. Instead, it seems to create exactly this kind of sludgy, imprecise advice. All of which is unintentionally revealing.