4 ms·

Bear in mind that this was almost a decade ago, and I wasn't directly involved. With that caveat: the core mechanisms for client / server coordination in Kix we

Bear in mind that this was almost a decade ago, and I wasn't directly involved. With that caveat: the core mechanisms for client / server coordination in Kix were a direct descendant from Trix (short for "Matrix"), which was the original code name for Google Sheets. And Kix was developed by a team in New York, an offshoot of the Trix team which was also in New York. Writely (post-acquisition) was in Mountain View, and Wave was in Australia (I forget which city), and the picture that might give you of how closely the various teams communicated is probably accurate. I don't know whether Trix originally used OT specifically, or the Kix team borrowed that idea from Wave. But the basic idea of clients performing small, tidy logical operations and then synchronizing them in realtime through a server was part of both Trix and Kix. Writely used a very different (and more primitive) approach. I don't know anything about the origin of the comments feature, but my guess is that there was no connection to Wave, except (again) possibly a bit of inspiration. The Wave team was very separate, both geographically and organizationally, and the tech stack they built was very disconnected from anything that was going on with Trix, Kix, or Writely.

puzzle 9y ago
Wave was in Sydney, the only Google engineering office in Australia. I walked through their space before they had even announced the project internally. All that almost everyone in the company knew was that Lars and co. were busy on something big. The rest of the office was aware of its nature, but sworn to secrecy until the announcement. I remember going by a whiteboard, looking at this architecture diagram (wavelets?) and still having little clue on what it was all about, other than it having something to do with threads. :-) I was asking because I have a vague recollection that Kix borrowed OT ideas or even code from Wave. But then I was even more removed from both teams than you. Or maybe it was just an aspirational thing from management to find a silver lining in the Wave shutdown.
- snewman 9y ago
  You might be right about the OT idea, or even some code, having been borrowed from Wave. I wouldn't necessarily have known about it (or I might simply have forgotten). But I'm pretty certain that Kix as an overall project was much more closely connected to Trix than to Wave.

puzzle 9y ago

Wave was in Sydney, the only Google engineering office in Australia. I walked through their space before they had even announced the project internally. All that almost everyone in the company knew was that Lars and co. were busy on something big. The rest of the office was aware of its nature, but sworn to secrecy until the announcement. I remember going by a whiteboard, looking at this architecture diagram (wavelets?) and still having little clue on what it was all about, other than it having something to do with threads. :-) I was asking because I have a vague recollection that Kix borrowed OT ideas or even code from Wave. But then I was even more removed from both teams than you. Or maybe it was just an aspirational thing from management to find a silver lining in the Wave shutdown.

snewman 9y ago
You might be right about the OT idea, or even some code, having been borrowed from Wave. I wouldn't necessarily have known about it (or I might simply have forgotten). But I'm pretty certain that Kix as an overall project was much more closely connected to Trix than to Wave.