The deep irony is that some of the original contributors to Birdwatch were working on this stuff at Facebook before being blocked for various reasons and leaving to work at Twitter.
To steelman this a bit, early versions of Birdwatch had problems with unsourced notes and speed of note display. There’s a bunch of research that shows that 1st impressions of info tend to dominate, so speed matters a lot.
In practice FB’s program was poorly resourced and overly complex so I’m not sure it ever achieved its theoretically lower latency.
Haha I was checking the comments precisely to see if this was the case. This happens nearly everywhere a language that isn't Java, Python, Ruby, Go, PHP, or JavaScript is used. IMO it has more to do with tech labor arbitrage[1] than anything technical. Even if a system is punching above its weight, over time, the Weird Language Choice spooks people enough that they get the rewrite bug.
Bleacher Report is a funny example: it used to be a darling example of Elixir, where a migration from Ruby -> Elixir claimed a move from "150 Ruby servers to 5 (probably overprovisioned) Elixir servers."[2] But then management and politics got scared, moved it all to more conventional tech, and the whole system suffered (see this legendary post[3]).
Fred Hebert describes a similar thing happening with a migration from Erlang deployments to Go/Docker/immutable, where you lose some pretty valuable capabilities by migrating to more conventional tech.[4]
I don't see this changing anytime soon -- we came of age when it was viable to attract investment with the promise of tech innovation. These days, those are liabilities because managers misunderstood the "Use Boring Technology" post the way consultants bartardized "Agile" (taking decent advice and misunderstanding it into something wholly different and horrifying). The result is you've got companies with customers in the 1000s using k8s, calling it "simple" and "Boring," whereas that same company would be called amateur if they did things like stateful deploys on-prem.[5]
Love your take on it. From a fellow prog languages enthusiast that matured, I can safely say that you are right.
I've coded in so many languages in my life, but the job market pull from Ruby always drags me back, with time, I began to really love and appreciate what Ruby is.
I still find Ruby a bit niche than other mainstream languages like Java and Python, I bet that if I had >5 years of Java, the Java market pull would be higher than Ruby and I'd be doing Java.
Ben Thompson tried to make this case in various places when Amazon was sued by the FTC. Roughly “businesses should be able to make a case for why you should still be a subscriber”.
I disagree. Fuck subscriptions, they’re predatory.
From the full screen cookie dialog preventing me from reading this article:
We and our 71 vendors process data for the following purposes:
Use precise geolocation data. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Store and/or access information on a device. Personalised advertising and content, advertising and content measurement, audience research and services development.
No no, don't look at what I'm doing when I'm complaining about someone else doing the same thing. THEY are doing much worse, so that means I'm not bad as long as someone else is worse.
Ehhh at this point Apple’s privacy strategy is little more than marketing. Sure they’ll push stuff to the edge to save themselves money and book the win, but they also are addicted to the billions they make selling your searches to Google.
Ugh, CarPlay 1 is exactly the division of responsibilities I want. I don’t want Apple anywhere near the actual driving functions and instruments. It takes a long time for my car to connect to CarPlay and it’d be super distracting to have the instruments suddenly change to Apple’s as I’m driving.
Are you a principal eng? The principal engs I’ve known express things in terms of measurable business problems. You have a list of practices with no success criteria.
A lot depends on exactly this, and what types of applications or features the developer org is responsible for building.
IaC could be useful if you're constantly spinning up new standardized apps, but if you're looking to increase deployment velocity it's not going to do much.
I'm also surprised that they're asking HN what should be improved -- I think HN is a random assortment of people working in or interested in tech, many of whom will happily give advice based on no expertise. I hope "ask on HN" is near the very end of their list, and they're just being thorough? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This sounds like mistaking five minutes of googling as research. Sorry, for being so snarky. Please look around you and talk to your new customers as other posters already suggested. And talk to the management. Which perceived problems lead to the creation of the position for someone responsible for developer experience?
To steelman this a bit, early versions of Birdwatch had problems with unsourced notes and speed of note display. There’s a bunch of research that shows that 1st impressions of info tend to dominate, so speed matters a lot.
In practice FB’s program was poorly resourced and overly complex so I’m not sure it ever achieved its theoretically lower latency.