Figma files for proposed IPO

This, “permissions, etc”, isn't just an enterprise-scale problem, any multi-tenant system can and probably will hit it.

Working out who can access what can sound simple enough, but it gets rather less pleasant when the rules can be set with more complex ACLs¹ and because people can move around dynamically it is both potentially resource heavy to derive and difficult to cache² both safely and³ efficiently. It is natural to think “well, we can simplify the permissions model”, but you really can't when selling to different enterprises: many have their own idiosyncratic workflows, or local tweaks if using an “industry standard” workflow, and they will make a noise if your software to support them without extra tricks on their part.

We are at a much smaller scale⁴, in another industry, but this is an issue we have to be very careful about.

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[1] Is this person in a given group? Does that give or remove permission? Can they just access, or edit, add, …? also: different elements on the same screen could have very different ACLs to each other and at different times in a process

[2] missing changes for a time could cause significant issues if users are working on something commercially important or otherwise sensitive

[3] Safe is easy: don't cache at all. Efficient is easy: don't care about a bit of staleness and accept a bit of “eventual consistency”/“eventual correctness”. Achieving both takes a pile of resource even with a great design.

[4] We don't have to worry about consistently spreading data and processing over a set of DCs as our product has natural borders between tenants so splitting off into distinct DBs⁵ is an easy answer to some of the scale & efficiency issues.

[5] rather than needing everything in on “public” system because anyone can potentially want to share access with any other user.

Every now and then I'm writing a PoC or greenfield project that you put down for 6 months. And sometimes when I pick it up to extend it, it will just so rapidly feel like it's getting out of control (I'm actually listening to the chemical brothers song of the same name at the moment!). I can at least usually fix that with some refactoring, but why didn't I get it right at the time? I don't know.

And it's often hard to figure out why, what architectural decision did you make to cause this. Pointing at the particular interface or pattern or method call chain that is the cause of a ton of complexity that could be fixed is much, much, much harder than most jobs in programming. And beyond the ability of 90% of developers.

The -2000 story popped up here again recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252), and it's of the same vein, why had no-one else done that? Because it takes extreme skill to simplify existing code. It's beyond most developers.

I think it's why we as an industry often obsess about things like space/tabs/semi-colons or not/etc. They're obvious improvements to an architecture, and everyone can join in. But really, they're a small improvement to a codebase, not a massive one.

And then you get the Evans of the world who just do it, almost effortlessly. I've worked with an Evan, and sometimes you'd look at his code and think "why?", but any attempt to change or improve it invariably made it worse. He'd picked that pattern or structure or method call chain and it was always the right choice. And after a day of poking at it, exploring the edges, trying to change it, you'd realize why.

And yes, sometimes the code was so complex other developers couldn't get it. And then they'd call me over to help because I could get it. And I'd look at it and realize it was complicated because it had to be like that. He'd actually done it in the simplest way possible.

And years later I still make the wrong choice sometimes, and I always think of Simon and wish I had his magic touch.

Even if he used to name functions Thing() and DoStuff() and forget to update them.

Huge contracts are built to extract as much wealth from the customer as possible without letting the victim know. Not by engineering talent. Huge contracts are what make Figma a success story.