They bought parse at a time when Facebook was struggling to do mobile right. Parse had the talent. That was my initial thought when the acquisition went down.
Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
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Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, personally, I think that this stack rewrite path makes a _lot_ of sense and probably should be planned from the beginning. The business requirements to the architecture — not functionality! — change over time. At first, you have to be lean as hell and try a lot of different stuff. Then, you need to scale, and performance becomes an issue. Some time afterwards, you want to add more features to increase monetizati…
Or you can be like WhatsApp, write once in Erlang, and scale to a billion users just with OS-level tweaks.
Source? I am skeptical WhatsApp is a single monolithic service at this point.
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#83Wow, talk about another ad disguised as an article. Damn South Park was right!
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#84Parse never made sense to me. I could see a service like Parse being useful, but it would need to be owned / operated by a nonprofit in order to gain any adoption. Otherwise, it's just another proprietary platform that will get shut off or changed once Facebook (or whoever) pivots to another business model to address that market. There's certainly demand, but I think most developers are wary about putting their compa…
It didn't make sense to me until I had a.) started a company and b.) saw the historical tech stacks of a number of companies (eg. Google, Facebook, EBay) that had hit it big. I started my career with the belief that your company has one tech stack, the chief architect chooses it when the company is founded, and that you never ever rewrite it because you're in for a world of pain if you do. I learned that basically no…
Took me rushing through all those years of insane coding in the last company I worked for. By the time I had quit, a fully functional game engine had undergone 3 rewrites with 2 more underway and with one of them not seeing the day of light. All for the same reasons you elucidated and some more.
While it was not 'idiots' that was the reason, the later developers always had just enough more data on the assumptions to be made for the current revision. But then again, not enough to foresee the need for a fresh rewrite when things changed again in the future. Sometimes, the rewrite was essential, sometimes it was just on a subjective whim to build a silver bullet once and for all!
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, personally, I think that this stack rewrite path makes a _lot_ of sense and probably should be planned from the beginning. The business requirements to the architecture — not functionality! — change over time. At first, you have to be lean as hell and try a lot of different stuff. Then, you need to scale, and performance becomes an issue. Some time afterwards, you want to add more features to increase monetizati…
Or you can be like WhatsApp, write once in Erlang, and scale to a billion users just with OS-level tweaks.
WhatsApp is one example, and if you're trying to imagine your own path, you should be thinking in statistics and probabilities. Imagine if the idea doesn't work out and you need to pivot. I'm not familiar with Erlang at all, but judging by the fact that (1) it was developed by a big telecom company and (2) it's priorities are stability and performance, I don't feel that it drastically changing business logic of an Erlang application is an easy task.
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you can be like WhatsApp, write once in Erlang, and scale to a billion users just with OS-level tweaks.
WhatsApp is one example, and if you're trying to imagine your own path, you should be thinking in statistics and probabilities. Imagine if the idea doesn't work out and you need to pivot. I'm not familiar with Erlang at all, but judging by the fact that (1) it was developed by a big telecom company and (2) it's priorities are stability and performance, I don't feel that it drastically changing business logic of an Er…
Being an Erlang developer myself: if you don't actually need the stability of a telecom (e.g. restartless upgrades that hold open circuit-based connections), pivoting around the logic of an Erlang app is about as easy as doing so in Ruby/Python/etc.
Though, that being said, I'd actually recommend Elixir, which gives you the same Erlang-ecosystem benefits, but with the key advantage of being 5x easier to convince the average Ruby/Python developer to use.
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It didn't make sense to me until I had a.) started a company and b.) saw the historical tech stacks of a number of companies (eg. Google, Facebook, EBay) that had hit it big. I started my career with the belief that your company has one tech stack, the chief architect chooses it when the company is founded, and that you never ever rewrite it because you're in for a world of pain if you do. I learned that basically no…
While I agree completely with your comment, I wished you'd written "made architectural choices based on facts that are no longer true" instead of "is an idiot." Nobody sets out to make bad choices on purpose, and only the extremely lucky make architectural choices that survive massive growth. (I believe Etsy had a policy of rewrites needing to support current needs multiplied by five. This acknowledges that there's a…
"based on facts that are no longer true" I don't think each successive wave is necessarily thinking about facts that were true but are no longer true. I think being opinionated about the tech stack you have to work with is often not all that rational. Trying to substitute concrete rational behaviour on the desires of new waves of employees might seem nice, or at least politically correct — but there is often no specific technical translation for "what idiot wrote this"; it's a cultural thing.
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#88>Can you trust your platform of choice, or will they close shop on you tomorrow? I'm thinking about moving to IBM BlueMix with parts of my business and asking myself the same question. What do you guys think? Will BlueMix still be there in a couple of years (3,4)? I know nobody using it, but IBM is promoting it quite aggressively, and it makes sense for me to have an alternative for both self-made AWS clusters (IaaS)…
I've been using BlueMix off and on since it was still Beta. I have noticed that a lot of things, particularly in the BaaS space, have changed significantly. While I'm sure BlueMix will be around, I doubt you'll make it 3 or 4 years without having to modify your code to accommodate changes to the platform.
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree completely with your comment, I wished you'd written "made architectural choices based on facts that are no longer true" instead of "is an idiot." Nobody sets out to make bad choices on purpose, and only the extremely lucky make architectural choices that survive massive growth. (I believe Etsy had a policy of rewrites needing to support current needs multiplied by five. This acknowledges that there's a…
I agree, but the actual words used when this discussion comes up very often are much closer to "What idiot designed this shit?" rather than "My coworkers made architectural choices based on facts that are no longer true". (At Google the latter was perhaps more common, but I've heard the former in startups a lot more frequently, and certainly on Internet message boards.) I'm perspective-taking on the part of all sides…
Once the next round of developers join, the scrappy MVP has usually been pushed far enough to be messy and maintainability becomes an issue. Seeing that might trigger the "idiot" reaction, The old guard appreciate how far it's come.