4 ms·
I love these posts for several reasons. 1. People think of companies like Uber primarily as providers of a regular service to customers (similarly to how Airbn
by drej 10y ago
I love these posts for several reasons.
1. People think of companies like Uber primarily as providers of a regular service to customers (similarly to how Airbnb or Netflix is perceived), but it's interesting to see the engineering chops needed to maintain this operation.
2. Given the relative youth of the company, the stack employed is quite modern and often uses cutting edge technologies in production and with real impact on custormers. Everyday users of these technologies usually only get 'textbook' explanations, but blog posts like these allow them to actually find out how these can be used in production, what the caveats are, how they interplay with other parts of the stack etc.
3. Some people complain that when a startup gets bought or implodes, their technology virtually disappears instead of benefitting the wider developer community for learning purposes (I'm not here to argue what the best practice should be, just stating an observation of a common complaint). By continually describing their engineering practices (similarly to Airbnb in their engineering blog) and open sourcing their non-business technology (e.g. go-torch), their experience lives on beyond the life of the company.
Last but not least, it build a positive ethos about this company in the developer community.
- zitterbewegung 10y agoIt seems there is more backlash for Uber's engineering blog posts though and the points seem to make me doubt Ubers engineering chops.
- gaius 10y agobut it's interesting to see the engineering chops needed to maintain this operation No. Uber has clearly hired too many engineers and has too little for them to do, leaving them free to come up with Rube Goldberg contraptions like this one. This is not anything any company that isn't swimming in money should even contemplate (and neither is slapping a layer on MySQL and claiming to have invented a "new datastore"). The kids are incharge of the nursery over at Uber and they are in desperate need of a good, adult CTO...
- toomuchtodo 10y agoIt doesn't surprise me that I had to scroll so far down in the thread to find this comment. Kudos for saying what needed to be said. EDIT: Make your system as simple as possible, but no more simple than that.
- privateprofile 10y ago> The kids are incharge of the nursery over at Uber and they are in desperate need of a good, adult CTO... That's a proper description of most startups I've had contact with recently, namely (well) funded startups. It's a consequence of having inexperienced (and, sometimes, untalented) people running functions at a company. It also applies to other areas like sales ("my inside sales script is killer, even though I haven't done professional sales anywhere before and just found out what inside sales is") or hiring ("I'll just hire my equally inexperienced buddies from college, they were great there"). But when it comes to kids building technology with "college playground" quality, it's too evident not to notice. The product ran fine when their buddies were testing, but it's unstable, unmaintainable and in need of a complete redesign when real world traffic comes along. All things that could have been prevented with a little bit of competence and experience. It's a kind of mantra for people that take VC blogs as gospel and engineering blogs as the 10 commandments. Don't go to college, don't get any real world experience: start a company and, if it actually survives more than a couple of years, someone will inherit your technical debt. This investor speak will quickly change when you get funded and have to attend board meetings to tell investors that your product is still not working, or you need twice the team that would be required for your goals, or you need months to produce basic business data...