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"WhatsApp doesn’t talk much about its engineering work" - Wrong as hell. They first talked about this in erlang conf about 3 yrs ago, in 2012. [Youtube Link]( h

"WhatsApp doesn’t talk much about its engineering work" - Wrong as hell. They first talked about this in erlang conf about 3 yrs ago, in 2012. [Youtube Link]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDk6l3tPBuw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDk6l3tPBuw ). I hate how tech blogs take a thing thats quite well known and old and spins into a "did you know?" post like it was just unraveled (Oh, maybe your staff just heard about it, doesnt mean no one knows shit.)

morley 11y ago
I'd say one talk at an erlang conference three years ago falls into the umbrella of not talking much. The article doesn't say "they never talk about engineering."
- rdtsc 11y ago
  It is an hour talk and it specifically mentions how Erlang was used and how it gave them a strategic advantage. I have found other mentions about it, perhaps on Erlang mail lists, here is an interview with Eugene Fooksman: https://pdincau.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/an-interview-with-eugene-fooksman-erlang/ https://pdincau.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/an-interview-with-e... """ And the consensus in our team is that it is largely because of Erlang. We’re managing to serve huge amount of connections from single front-end server (this is from last year’s Erlang """ I don't know how much clearer can it get. Here is another directly from their website: https://blog.whatsapp.com/196/1-million-is-so-2011 https://blog.whatsapp.com/196/1-million-is-so-2011 It is a bit older they clearly indicate that FreeBSD and Erlang are key and critical elements that let them operate they way they do.
rdtsc 11y ago
Reading through comments, I think there is an undercurrent of slight envy or resentment (perhaps unconscious) both towards WhatsApp and Erlang. We are rational people so we'll never admit to that, so it comes out in other objections "It is a simple system", "I could do the backend in a weekend"... There are a lot of startup people here, who work at a startup, bet their time, money, life? on one, and talking about a successful lean startup sold for 19B probably bring feelings of "How come it is not my startup?". And then for Erlang, it has different syntax, and have to think about concurrency, functional programming, and it is hard for someone used to curly braces. Maybe many tried it, but dismissed it, or bet (time, money, life?) one something else so it is easy to say "But it is not about the platform or technology". Because other conclusions might mean "heck, maybe I made a mistake, I should have that up as well for my problem domain", nobody like to feel that way. Of course, nevermind that engineers from WhatApp have mentioned Erlang was one of their strategic advantages. Managing 2-3M connections per machine means needing to have fault tolerance (so Erlang is a good choice), but also means managing an order of magnitude less machines! One of the deeper insights we can learn in general is that at scale no matter how cool the concurrency mechanisms, how fast, and new, if they don't go hand in hand with fault isolation then it will just be a very fast system until it starts crashing and its throughput drops to 0. Of course you can do fault isolation with separate servers and OS processes (containers,VMs...) but in this case they do it at a finer grained level.
- aianus 11y ago
  I resent them because Whatsapp is terrible, terrible software compared to Facebook Messenger yet somehow made $19B. 1. No web interface, I'm forced to use a tiny mobile keyboard 2. Identity tied to my phone number which changes every month 3. Ugly (subjective) 4. My friends are already on Facebook, why have another service that does the same thing but worse. 5. No chat bubbles. 6. No meme search I could go on and on. They just got lucky and hit the lotto with foreigners who couldn't afford decent phones and are now locked in to their platform. Edit: formatting
  - biokoda 11y ago
    Why does your phone number change every month?
    - aianus 11y ago
      Because I travel a lot and use local SIM cards.
      - conorgdaly 11y ago
        Whilst abroad, I've used foreign sim cards in my phone and all Whatsapp does is prompt to keep the existing number or change to new number.
        aianus 11y ago
        But how do you tell people to add you on WhatsApp? I don't even know my phone number. Phone numbers are a poor replacement for email addresses or usernames. Edit: not to mention the security implications of having authentication tied to one's phone number. Any telecom employee, foreign government agent, or skilled social engineer can impersonate one on WhatsApp reasonably easily.
  - the_af 11y ago
    > 1. No web interface, I'm forced to use a tiny mobile keyboard No idea how recent this is, I discovered it a couple of weeks ago: https://web.whatsapp.com/ https://web.whatsapp.com/

morley 11y ago

I'd say one talk at an erlang conference three years ago falls into the umbrella of not talking much. The article doesn't say "they never talk about engineering."

rdtsc 11y ago
It is an hour talk and it specifically mentions how Erlang was used and how it gave them a strategic advantage. I have found other mentions about it, perhaps on Erlang mail lists, here is an interview with Eugene Fooksman: https://pdincau.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/an-interview-with-eugene-fooksman-erlang/ https://pdincau.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/an-interview-with-e... """ And the consensus in our team is that it is largely because of Erlang. We’re managing to serve huge amount of connections from single front-end server (this is from last year’s Erlang """ I don't know how much clearer can it get. Here is another directly from their website: https://blog.whatsapp.com/196/1-million-is-so-2011 https://blog.whatsapp.com/196/1-million-is-so-2011 It is a bit older they clearly indicate that FreeBSD and Erlang are key and critical elements that let them operate they way they do.

rdtsc 11y ago

Reading through comments, I think there is an undercurrent of slight envy or resentment (perhaps unconscious) both towards WhatsApp and Erlang. We are rational people so we'll never admit to that, so it comes out in other objections "It is a simple system", "I could do the backend in a weekend"... There are a lot of startup people here, who work at a startup, bet their time, money, life? on one, and talking about a successful lean startup sold for 19B probably bring feelings of "How come it is not my startup?". And then for Erlang, it has different syntax, and have to think about concurrency, functional programming, and it is hard for someone used to curly braces. Maybe many tried it, but dismissed it, or bet (time, money, life?) one something else so it is easy to say "But it is not about the platform or technology". Because other conclusions might mean "heck, maybe I made a mistake, I should have that up as well for my problem domain", nobody like to feel that way. Of course, nevermind that engineers from WhatApp have mentioned Erlang was one of their strategic advantages. Managing 2-3M connections per machine means needing to have fault tolerance (so Erlang is a good choice), but also means managing an order of magnitude less machines! One of the deeper insights we can learn in general is that at scale no matter how cool the concurrency mechanisms, how fast, and new, if they don't go hand in hand with fault isolation then it will just be a very fast system until it starts crashing and its throughput drops to 0. Of course you can do fault isolation with separate servers and OS processes (containers,VMs...) but in this case they do it at a finer grained level.

aianus 11y ago
I resent them because Whatsapp is terrible, terrible software compared to Facebook Messenger yet somehow made $19B. 1. No web interface, I'm forced to use a tiny mobile keyboard 2. Identity tied to my phone number which changes every month 3. Ugly (subjective) 4. My friends are already on Facebook, why have another service that does the same thing but worse. 5. No chat bubbles. 6. No meme search I could go on and on. They just got lucky and hit the lotto with foreigners who couldn't afford decent phones and are now locked in to their platform. Edit: formatting
- biokoda 11y ago
  Why does your phone number change every month?
  - aianus 11y ago
    Because I travel a lot and use local SIM cards.
    - conorgdaly 11y ago
      Whilst abroad, I've used foreign sim cards in my phone and all Whatsapp does is prompt to keep the existing number or change to new number.
      - aianus 11y ago
        But how do you tell people to add you on WhatsApp? I don't even know my phone number. Phone numbers are a poor replacement for email addresses or usernames. Edit: not to mention the security implications of having authentication tied to one's phone number. Any telecom employee, foreign government agent, or skilled social engineer can impersonate one on WhatsApp reasonably easily.
- the_af 11y ago
  > 1. No web interface, I'm forced to use a tiny mobile keyboard No idea how recent this is, I discovered it a couple of weeks ago: https://web.whatsapp.com/ https://web.whatsapp.com/