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"Our founding engineers had learned from their experience working at Google and Facebook that to ensure a performant and stable application, they would need to

"Our founding engineers had learned from their experience working at Google and Facebook that to ensure a performant and stable application, they would need to build their own framework" Wow. Interesting.

xmprt 6y ago
I didn't believe that was an actual quote from the article until I read it. It sounds like a joke and I can't imagine anyone reasonable would say that. There are definitely good reasons to build your own framework but performant and stable applications isn't one of them. Usually it's a solution looking for a problem.
- untog 6y ago
  In fairness the decision was made in 2009. I still don’t think it was the right decision but it feels a lot more understandable to have made that choice when looking at the frameworks available in 09 rather than 2020.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    Was this a front end web framework or back end?
    - imslavko 6y ago
      I never worked at Asana but I heard it was both, it had code sharing between client and server, some server-side javascript before node.js (I think it was based on JSC) and something similar to isomorphic javascript before this term was coined by Airbnb. If you look at Meteor, a lot of similar ideas migrated there.
- dgb23 6y ago
  By this logic nobody would ever build a framework designed around performance and stability?
  - wbl 6y ago
    Stability is the result of smoothing out bugs the hard way. A new framework has bugs, you just haven't found them yet.
- jayparth 6y ago
  What? Facebook built react to solve these problems. When they built Luna stuff like react didn't exist. Investing in developer tooling including frameworks is a fine use of time and often pays off hugely. There wasn't a better alternative 11 years ago.
tantaman 6y ago
weird. Not sure how they would have been hired at Google or FB with this mindset.
- ahupp 6y ago
  Dustin Moskovitz, one of the "founding engineers", was a co-founder of Facebook.
robot 6y ago
just use nodejs
tlrobinson 6y ago
Keep in mind, Asana was founded in 2008. Luna had some of the same concepts underpinning React, about 5 years earlier.
dx034 6y ago
At Google or Facebook that makes sense. If you encounter much larger scale than pretty much any other company, it's hard to find libraries that work for you. So the observation was correct but they should've concluded that this is just a result of scale and complexity, not a general strategy.
IndexPointer 6y ago
That was in 2009 apparently. Maybe it made sense then.

xmprt 6y ago

I didn't believe that was an actual quote from the article until I read it. It sounds like a joke and I can't imagine anyone reasonable would say that. There are definitely good reasons to build your own framework but performant and stable applications isn't one of them. Usually it's a solution looking for a problem.

untog 6y ago
In fairness the decision was made in 2009. I still don’t think it was the right decision but it feels a lot more understandable to have made that choice when looking at the frameworks available in 09 rather than 2020.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Was this a front end web framework or back end?
  - imslavko 6y ago
    I never worked at Asana but I heard it was both, it had code sharing between client and server, some server-side javascript before node.js (I think it was based on JSC) and something similar to isomorphic javascript before this term was coined by Airbnb. If you look at Meteor, a lot of similar ideas migrated there.
dgb23 6y ago
By this logic nobody would ever build a framework designed around performance and stability?
- wbl 6y ago
  Stability is the result of smoothing out bugs the hard way. A new framework has bugs, you just haven't found them yet.
jayparth 6y ago
What? Facebook built react to solve these problems. When they built Luna stuff like react didn't exist. Investing in developer tooling including frameworks is a fine use of time and often pays off hugely. There wasn't a better alternative 11 years ago.

tantaman 6y ago

weird. Not sure how they would have been hired at Google or FB with this mindset.

ahupp 6y ago
Dustin Moskovitz, one of the "founding engineers", was a co-founder of Facebook.

robot 6y ago

just use nodejs

tlrobinson 6y ago

Keep in mind, Asana was founded in 2008. Luna had some of the same concepts underpinning React, about 5 years earlier.

dx034 6y ago

At Google or Facebook that makes sense. If you encounter much larger scale than pretty much any other company, it's hard to find libraries that work for you. So the observation was correct but they should've concluded that this is just a result of scale and complexity, not a general strategy.

IndexPointer 6y ago

That was in 2009 apparently. Maybe it made sense then.