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Figma files for proposed IPO

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Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#91

Post by handfuloflight »

sowbug wrote: post #84
op00to wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any specific lines you can point to as examples in an open source repo?

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#92

Post by danielvaughn »

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…

It’s a bad thing if you make a simple thing more complicated than it needs to be.

But there are plenty of Hard Problems out there, for which no sufficient code could be called “simple.” Plenty of aspects of font rendering fall within this bucket. It’s notoriously difficult.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#93

Post by danielvaughn »

colesantiago wrote: post #15
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…

Don't forget the incredible lock in Figma has in the design space. Figma just has to jack up the price in order to appease Wall Street quarterly. Business wise it's got a great margin, but the avaricious nature of Wall St. will force them to enshittify the entire product, the engineering doesn't matter unless Wall St. is satisfied.

I’m in a monthly meetup with designers (not randos, these are typically people who are known in the industry), and half the time is spent shitting on Figma. It’s not necessarily the quality of their design product, it’s the business model and their general focus as a company.

There are several things designers need that Figma has dragged their feet on for years, and when they do release them, they’re usually behind the enterprise paywall. Or they don’t release them at all, instead opting to build some horizontal product like Slides because their investors want a bigger TAM.

Figma has the power of the network effect at present, but you can only charge people to use variables for so long before they look for an alternative.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#94

Post by teitoklien »

Panzer04 wrote: post #89
mattmaroon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

SEC and most states like delaware where companies incorporate do have minority shareholder protections, regardless of these terms.

A board of directors can screw shareholders even without one controlling director.

The protections for minority shareholder are seperate.

Also the news of malpractice by directors like you mention leads to SEC investigations and stocks come crashing down before they can sell it (as they must declare their stock sales a few days before doing it)

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#95

Post by wbl »

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…

Computer typography is a dark art. It requires understanding a whole domain with its own terminology and traditions as well as aesthetic sense, then combine that with the programming knowledge.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#96

Post by aegypti »

rglover wrote: post #37
pixxel wrote: post #3

If you’re tired of it all, and the inevitable, and you have agency, try penpot.app

Also Sketch [1]. Everyone abandoned it when Figma became the pOpUlAr tool, but I still use it every day, nearly 15 years later and it's continued to improve. [1] https://sketch.com

Still the default for most teams at Apple AFAIK

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#98

Post by Panzer04 »

teitoklien wrote: post #94
Panzer04 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

SEC and most states like delaware where companies incorporate do have minority shareholder protections, regardless of these terms. A board of directors can screw shareholders even without one controlling director. The protections for minority shareholder are seperate. Also the news of malpractice by directors like you mention leads to SEC investigations and stocks come crashing down before they can sell it (as they m…

Given cases like Elon moving to less protective jursidictions, those protections are not necessarily as protective as you might prefer, especially if you sign them away at some point in the past.

It's going to be a lot harder to protect your rights, especially around the margins, if you agree to terms like the above.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#99

Post by switz »

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.

The reason to write code is to solve a problem. If the problem domain is complex, then the code to solve said problem will be inherently complex. He solved a problem.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#100

Post by chrisweekly »

cluckindan wrote: post #28
snickerdoodle12 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rendering engine handles curve rendering, images, blurs, masking, blending, and opacity groups, and optimizes for high visual fidelity. And thats how you get designers whining that their design looks great in figma but not in a real webpage

This, so much this. I’ve been thinking about a box-first approach to design tooling. The overall layout workflow would consist only of adding boxes (block-level elements) to a blank web page, or inside other boxes. Boxes could also contain other elements like inputs, buttons, images, etc.

See https://every-layout.dev for a mind-blowingly well-thought-out approach to CSS that builds from first principles and leverages sane primitives and a typographic scale to compose dynamic layouts... it's boxes, and it's beautiful.
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