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

I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

basta.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 565 posts

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#91

Post by bastawhiz »

idkyall wrote: post #83
brap wrote: post #62

> He simply couldn’t believe that I’d written a full spreadsheet engine that ran in the browser. I can't believe it either, and I don't mean this in a good way. Apache POI lets you run headless Excel. You import and interact with sheets programmatically in Java. We used this in my old workplace for exactly the same reason (functions, cell references, the whole thing), it worked great. You found the ‘circ’ problem wit…

I think one of the biggest growth areas for junior engineers to reach mid-level and senior is recognizing when you're re-inventing the wheel. E.g. If you are given a programming task to do anything related to Excel or the Microsoft Office suite, it's worth googling it first, because some engineer somewhere was probably tasked with doing the same thing a decade ago and has written a blog post or made a GitHub repo for…

> some engineer somewhere was probably tasked with doing the same thing a decade ago

*Seven year ago at Uber

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#92

Post by bastawhiz »

brap wrote: post #79
rkangel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, he wrote a spreadsheet engine that could run one particular spreadsheet . Admittedly a complex one, but it was a fixed set of functions that he needed to implement and not and endless tail of things that people expect Excel to do. I think I'd probably have argued more about the UI spec and down some Excel behind the scenes but it is a familiar UI if you've got lots of number inputs all over the place. I'v…

Project requirements are never fixed, they’re always evolving. It was only a matter of time before users would’ve complained about features being missing/broken, especially since what they’re used to is Excel and this was meant to replace it.

> this was meant to replace it.

I think that's a very generous read of what I said the requirements for this product were.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#95

Post by [deleted] »

erulabs wrote: post #23

I read this article looking forward to the complex bespoke code to be ripped out and deleted - but the author clearly grew as an engineer in a way I didn’t expect: > Sometimes that’s just how it is. The devops saying “Cattle, not pets” is apt here: code (and by proxy, the products built with that code) is cattle. It does a job for you, and when that job is no longer useful, the code is ready to be retired. If you tre…

[deleted]

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#96

Post by xen0 »

Reubend wrote: post #40

Love the part about circular references. I gotta say though - I'm having a difficult time imagining how complex these fomulas are that reimplementing Excel's formula engine is easier than just porting the formulas into JS.

Honestly, if you're at 'thousands of formulae' across multiple sheets, I'd probably suggest writing a graph based execution engine too.

The circular reference thing would have definitely thrown me for a loop though.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#97

Post by JohnMakin »

idkyall wrote: post #83
brap wrote: post #62

> He simply couldn’t believe that I’d written a full spreadsheet engine that ran in the browser. I can't believe it either, and I don't mean this in a good way. Apache POI lets you run headless Excel. You import and interact with sheets programmatically in Java. We used this in my old workplace for exactly the same reason (functions, cell references, the whole thing), it worked great. You found the ‘circ’ problem wit…

I think one of the biggest growth areas for junior engineers to reach mid-level and senior is recognizing when you're re-inventing the wheel. E.g. If you are given a programming task to do anything related to Excel or the Microsoft Office suite, it's worth googling it first, because some engineer somewhere was probably tasked with doing the same thing a decade ago and has written a blog post or made a GitHub repo for…

It's not just junior engineers. Senior/management can fall into this trap as well.

At one of my former companies we had a small problem with whitelisting cloudflare IP's that don't typically change super duper often but definitely cannot be assumed to be static. My boss at that time decided the solution was this big initiative he called "whitelist maker" and assigned it to me. I don't remember what implementation details he wanted, but it was some insane rube-goldberg machine to basically pull down this list: https://www.cloudflare.com/ips-v4 and then put it into some terraform code.

I ended up quietly killing the project during a re-org and used the cloudflare provider, which conveniently provides the forementioned IPv4 list as a data source in 1 line of code. Done, 5 mins work. He had scheduled out an entire quarter and half of a team's resources for it.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#98

Post by dmd »

> So the data scientists have multiple laptops that they download the data to, then run the models overnight.

This haphazard way of running compute jobs really stuck out to me. I can't imagine doing things this way (rather than having a central compute cluster running SLURM or similar) at a company bigger than, say, a dozen people - much less the scale of Uber. What's the rationale? Even if it's just a cluster of 3 or 4 machines in a rack shoved in the corner, isn't that better than ... laptops?

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#99

Post by MichaelZuo »

bastawhiz wrote: post #58
acchow wrote: post #43

> Over the summer of 2016, we came up against a new twist on the project. We had a model that ran overnight to generate data for anticipated ridership in China. That data wasn’t useful on its own, but if you fed it into a tab on a special Excel spreadsheet, you’d get a little interactive Excel tool for choosing driver incentives. Our job was to take that spreadsheet and make it available as the interface for this mod…

Because the city teams were in China, we didn't have this luxury. Everything had to be behind Uber's beyondcorp equivalent, and there was no real way to auth folks from the Chinese mainland. Our only surface was the browser.

A dedicated satellite link cross pacific is not that much money. Then again maybe the CFO didn't know so he took the easiest known option.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#100

Post by hitekker »

continuitylimit wrote: post #24
bastawhiz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. The code was originally written outside of work hours. I offered the code to Box and they didn't want it. If Uber wants a few thousand lines of JavaScript from over half a decade ago that didn't originate with them and that they used for less than a month, they can send me a letter.

So come on man, let’s be honest here. I got serious sacred masterpiece vibes from this story. This reminds me of some Hindu parable about people who let go of possessions and head out to become ascetics. So there is this wealthy man and wife and the wife is all upset because her brother keeps insinuating that he’s gonna go ascetic and cut loose. The husband tells her to stop her crying and don’t worry about it, he ai…

I might be dumb today but I think this parable is incomprehensible. Do you have a link to another version?
Post reply on HN