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Figma files for proposed IPO

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Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#81

Post by Vanclief »

nicce wrote: post #71
hiphipjorge wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former figma engineer, let me be the first to say that Evan Wallace is, in fact, a legend. A true 100x-er. There's still parts of the codebase basically no one at Figma really understands that Evan wrote back in the day. One example of that is something like he adapted a shader we use internally to render font glyphs, which no one has touched ever since. The engineer who told me this had spent a few days trying…

I don’t know anything about shaders and this is not personal against Evan, but if someone wrotes code that nobody understands, isn’t it bad thing and not good thing? I thought similarly (admired) many years ago, that those people are wizards and that is cool, but the older I get, less I think so. You often can write the same thing so that it is also easier for others to understand. In most cases, when we talk about c…

Exactly, I had the same issue when I was younger. I thought if I read code I could not understand was because the other dev was a legend. Now its the opposite, I am amazed by code that does its job well, its understandable and has low complexity.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#82

Post by rudi-c »

hiphipjorge wrote: post #60
btown wrote: post #10

They don't link to the Form S-1 prospectus from their announcement, but it's publicly available at https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025... Their highlighted metrics page: $821M LTM revenue, 46% YoY revenue growth, 18% non-GAAP operating margin, 91% gross margin. It's an incredible success story, and the engineering they did upfront (primarily led by co-founder Evan Wallace) that set the stage…

As a former figma engineer, let me be the first to say that Evan Wallace is, in fact, a legend. A true 100x-er. There's still parts of the codebase basically no one at Figma really understands that Evan wrote back in the day. One example of that is something like he adapted a shader we use internally to render font glyphs, which no one has touched ever since. The engineer who told me this had spent a few days trying…

Font rendering is indeed complex, but the anecdote seems to be misleading readers into thinking Evan wrote obscure code.

I worked extensively in the parts of the Figma where Evan wrote a lot of foundational code, and have also worked directly with him on building the plugin API.

One of Evan's strong points as a CTO is that he was very pragmatic and that was reflected in his code. Things that could be simple were simple, things that needed complexity did not shy away from it.

While all codebases have early decisions that later get changed, I'd say that largely speaking, Figma's editor codebase was built upon foundations that stood the test of time. This includes choices such as the APIs used to build product code, interact with multiplayer, the balance between using OOP v.s. more functional or JS-like patterns, the balance between writing code in C++/WASM v.s. JS, etc. Many of these choices can be credited to Evan directly or his influence.

Subsequent engineers that joined were able to build upon the product without causing a spiraling mess of complexity thanks to those good decisions made early on. In my opinion, this is why Figma was able to ship complex new features without being bogged down by exploding tech debt, and a major contributing factor to the business's success as a whole.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#83

Post by stevage »

zdragnar wrote: post #76
YZF wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this alignment the issue with your application? Are there design alternatives that would be impacted less by some rendering engine differences? What about other browsers? Versions? Platforms? OS? Resolution/screen size? My huge frontend team can't handle this, even before we used Figma. Isn't the problem trying to get this "web platform" do something it was never meant to do? How would this be solved by Figma usin…

I've been fighting the way figma interprets fonts for years. It's not too bad at my current company, but at my last company things would look great in figma but with the exact same styles applied they'd be wrong in every browser. That's the sort of thing people are complaining about here. I'm sure there's something fundamentally wrong with the font files. In both cases, they're not standard, widely available fonts. W…

My solution in these cases was to build prototype sites that sync in real time from the figma file. So the designer can see how their work actually looks, and treat the figma view as just a low fidelity preview.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#84

Post by sowbug »

op00to wrote: post #68
hiphipjorge wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former figma engineer, let me be the first to say that Evan Wallace is, in fact, a legend. A true 100x-er. There's still parts of the codebase basically no one at Figma really understands that Evan wrote back in the day. One example of that is something like he adapted a shader we use internally to render font glyphs, which no one has touched ever since. The engineer who told me this had spent a few days trying…

I don’t mean this to throw shade, but isn’t the whole point of writing code that someone else can understand it? I worked with some crazy smart people when I was in academia, and when one of them left it was not worth trying to maintain what they left behind because it was so often inscrutable.

Even well-written code can be hard to understand -- practically impossible, even -- if what it's doing is sufficiently complex. Cryptography and certain areas of graphics have humbled me, for instance. I followed the flow, and I appreciated the comments, but I did not understand.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#86

Post by crossroadsguy »

I see this play out a lot in my country’s stock market. Where numbers are fine and all hunky dory. But in reality all increase in share prices — those meteoric rises has already happened behind the curtain which separates it from the public (and for good). And then IPO comes and the public mostly oays for the final exit.

Is this an IPO where participants (public) will make long term money of it’s already at the top and this is the final stage of “finding someone to hold the bag” and in this case eventually — the public i.e the retail trader, mostly?

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#87

Post by com2kid »

op00to wrote: post #68
hiphipjorge wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former figma engineer, let me be the first to say that Evan Wallace is, in fact, a legend. A true 100x-er. There's still parts of the codebase basically no one at Figma really understands that Evan wrote back in the day. One example of that is something like he adapted a shader we use internally to render font glyphs, which no one has touched ever since. The engineer who told me this had spent a few days trying…

I don’t mean this to throw shade, but isn’t the whole point of writing code that someone else can understand it? I worked with some crazy smart people when I was in academia, and when one of them left it was not worth trying to maintain what they left behind because it was so often inscrutable.

Font rendering code is a nightmare because the problem is really damn hard. Font files are complex, and actual real world usage is even worse.

Any code that involves parsing old school binary file formats is going to look ugly to modern day developers who are used to JSON everything, even if the code is actually very well structured.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#88

Post by andrekandre »

F7F7F7 wrote: post #14
btown wrote: post #10

They don't link to the Form S-1 prospectus from their announcement, but it's publicly available at https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025... Their highlighted metrics page: $821M LTM revenue, 46% YoY revenue growth, 18% non-GAAP operating margin, 91% gross margin. It's an incredible success story, and the engineering they did upfront (primarily led by co-founder Evan Wallace) that set the stage…

I was one of their first Enterprise customers way back in 2017’ish-give-or-take. The brilliance of the system he built was that it allowed for real time collaboration. Which was god send from the Sketch -> Zeplin -> Invision -> Avocode (version management) ‘stack’ that lost Enterprise design orgs were using. Which was already a large leap from what Adobe was expecting us to do with Photoshop/Illustrator (after they d…

  > It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering. It’s just that the benefits far outweighed the small drop in snappiness.
yep, even though i personally prefer sketch, if i was running a company i'd most likely go with figma as well because of the collaborative capabilities; its just a huge productivity boost for collaborative teams

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#89

Post by Panzer04 »

mattmaroon wrote: post #39
Animats wrote: post #32

There's a president-for-life clause: "Immediately following the completion of this offering, and assuming no exercise of the underwriters’ over-allotment option, Dylan Field, our Chair of our Board of Directors, Chief Executive Officer, and President will hold or have the ability to control approximately % of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock, including % of the voting power pursuant to the Wallace Pr…

That generally makes me more inclined to invest as I find that the biggest problem with a lot of public companies is they manage to Wall Street which means putting the short term over the long term, and those are often at odds with each other.

There are a whole lot of companies that are run to benefit their management and not their shareholders. At best, they might be making no money but keeping a bunch of people in work.

There's a good reason public shareholders historically demanded accountability - maybe it's fine for now, but all it takes is some management that you can't kick out, paying themselves extortionate salaries and driving the company into the ground at the same time to recognise the problems with "owning" a company you have no right to actually control (via replacing management and so on)

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#90

Post by dawnerd »

Zealotux wrote: post #34
ElevenLathe wrote: post #24

[flagged]

Figma's enshittification started back when there were talks of Adobe taking over, it's already bloated beyond reason.

I find it kind of ridiculous that I need dev mode to get some values that they expose outside of dev mode but in a less dev friendly way. I know there's more to it, but come on...
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