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The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
- mattgerstman 6y agoAuthor here, happy to answer any questions about how we build products at Dropbox.
- mingw__ 6y agoWould love to hear more about API-QL. It doesn't sound like this is something available for public use yet. Is there any plan to open source this?
- mattgerstman 6y agoAPI-QL is essentially a glue layer to make our internal interface, Stone, play nicely with Apollo. We might open source some pieces of it, but the vast majority of it is code generation for very specific Dropbox use cases. https://github.com/dropbox/stone https://github.com/dropbox/stone
- gustavomd 6y agoVery well written and amazing job. I really trust Dropbox engineering teams. My only wish would be the return of the simple desktop app for those of us that just need ultra reliable synced folders (I use macOS). The app today is bloated and upon boot takes 600MB of RAM. Would you guys ever consider a streamlined version of the app for desktop?
- mattgerstman 6y agoThis is definitely something we're talking about. We're aware there are a set of users who want just sync and we're figuring out how to ship that while making our other features discoverable.
- infogulch 6y agoHN is a tough crowd to sell everyman software to. Compared to your moderately tech literate person off the street, many here fiercely stand their ground on the computing solutions that they choose. Maybe this is a consequence of knowing how the sausage is made. I admire your goal to try to deliver value to both groups. I think this strategy is broadly underappreciated, and I expect it improves the product faster than focusing on either group exclusively.
- mattgerstman 6y agoThanks so much. We love to share how we build things with the tech community and we know the tradeoffs when we post them. We're just a bunch of people doing our best to do right by our users.
- webmaven 6y ago> This is definitely something we're talking about. We're aware there are a set of users who want just sync and we're figuring out how to ship that while making our other features discoverable. Excellent. I would go a bit further. I not only just want sync, but I'm willing to (mostly) give up the hosted mirroring in order to get unlimited user friendly device-device file synchronization[0]. On top of that, there are plenty of scenarios (largely around collaboration and/or mobile) where I would like to selectively opt-in to cloud mirroring, for which I'd be quite happy to pay a modest amount. So this folder of personal documents and ebooks[1] synced across these devices (potentially including another user's, if/when they are on the same local network) but no mirroring in the cloud, and that folder of photos synced only between my laptop and my phone, including cloud storage backup and mirroring ($). [0] Yes, I'm aware that there are plenty of solutions, starting with rsync etc., that I could cobble together, but most of them aren't particularly user-friendly. [1] BTW, have you thought of selling a Dropbox-centric e-reader?
- solarkraft 6y agoRegarding [0]: Are you aware of Syncthing? It's p2p, allows you to select folders and exactly which devices they are shared with. I have personally had issues with it, but it seems like I'm the only one. The feature set seems to perfectly check out.
- solarkraft 6y ago> The app today is bloated and upon boot takes 600MB of RAM Is that a joke or a bug?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- abathur 6y agoI don't have time to absorb all of this right now, but I do still want to thank you for creating it. :) I consider what I see as process/project blogging to be one of the Internet's unsung heroes, but a lot of it has a narrow focus. As someone who hasn't worked on a project with this many hands involved (outside of OSS, at least), it's nice to get a peek behind that curtain. Looking forward to giving it a more careful read.
- mattgerstman 6y agoThanks so much! I had the realization recently that we don't talk a lot about what engineers do outside of writing code and the Plus launch was the perfect narrative to talk about it.
- gee_totes 6y agoDefinitely appreciated the tips at the bottom of the article. Did you use anything like Storybook to share the component library?
- mattgerstman 6y agoWe do use storybook! We have an internal design system called DIG that may eventually be shared more publicly. Each individual feature gets a "product component library" which is a way to rapidly build components on top of DIG.
- webmaven 6y ago> We have an internal design system called DIG that may eventually be shared more publicly. DIG == Dropbox Interface Guide(lines)?
- butz 6y agoWill Dropbox client for Linux get some attention? It would be great if .dropbox directories adhered to XDG directory specs.
- mattgerstman 6y agoFWIW I've passed this note along to our sync team but I don't have a ton of insight here.
- s9w 6y agoGo scream at your boss. Dropbox has jumped the shark. Why am I getting red warning signs on my dropbox tray to advertise new features? I'm paying a shitton of money and using less than 1%. Take the money and just be silent. Dropbox is a tiny tool. I don't want to hear about it ever. _ever_
- radihuq 6y agoThis was a great read, thanks for writing it up. As another person mentioned I especially liked and appreciated the bite-sized tips at the end! Definitely got some insight & inspiration I'll be using in my own projects
- mattgerstman 6y agoThanks so much!
- necrotic_comp 6y agoNo real question, but I do want to say thank you for writing and maintaining the daemon for Linux. I use Dropbox as, essentially, one disk shared across my many computers. This has been invaluable in keeping my life in order, and I'm a happy customer.
- mattgerstman 6y agoThanks for the kind words. I'm not at all responsible for this, but I'll pass it on to our sync team.
- mattgerstman 6y agoThanks so much for all the feedback! I'm signing off from answering comments.
- boromi 6y agoI wish dropbox had fewer features not more. Peak dropbox was like 5 years ago
- ffpip 6y agoYeah. It's too expensive now. G Suite is $12 USD / user / month. It gives you unlimited storage. AND everything else like Meet, Forms, Docs, Slides, Mail, Sheets, Apps Script, etc. Dropbox is $15 / user / month. For 5 TB. How does that even make sense? The features are also lacking. SSL is apparently a feature now.
- somehnguy 6y agoG Suite is an incredible value. I have an account with a single user, paying $12+tax/month. On that account I have 20TB in Drive. Good luck getting that kind of storage pricing elsewhere, I'm actually nervous about Google ever deciding to kill the heaviest users or charge more because I don't know where else I would go. In my understanding my 20TB isn't just 20TB sitting in their datacenter, it's de-duped across accounts. But still, amazing value.
- the_svd_doctor 6y agoIsn't it <= 1TB if less than 5 users ?
- somehnguy 6y agoTechnically, yes. But it has never been enforced AFAIK. That could change tomorrow of course, so I would be cautious of using it for anything that is very important.
- the_svd_doctor 6y agoHo! Very interesting. I always thought it was very much an active thing.
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- Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago> While we started as a storage company, we‘ve grown to be a hub to manage your digital life. This line from the linked post is a great summary of exactly how I think Dropbox's product direction has taken a turn for the worse. This is no sleight against the author (who seems to be doing great work; I enjoyed this read!) or the engineering team. Just like, the general direction of the company. This line also stands out: > it had been a while since we delivered new value to our personal users. I can't speak for all paying users, but the value I derive from Dropbox is how it syncs fast and "just works". I do _not_ find new value in popups and notification badges about features that other companies have already perfected (much like I don't need to go anywhere else for file syncing). I realize I'm not representative of the userbase as a whole, I'm just frustrated.
- mattgerstman 6y agoWe get it. The simple truth is we need to provide more than just storage to succeed in the marketplace. We rewrote our sync engine recently to make things much more performant and we're working on shipping more value to users with fewer upsells. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o... FWIW you can turn off all the notifications in the preference panel.
- sugarpile 6y ago(this sounds snarky but is not, I'm genuinely asking) Which notifications option do I uncheck to stop from getting the popup asking me to upgrade to dropbox plus that I got this morning?
- mattgerstman 6y agoClick the dropbox icon, click your avatar, preferences, notifications for most in app notifications. TBH the whole point of Basic is to be a trial sku so I don't know if you can turn those off. We do want you to become a paying customer :D
- huma 6y agoI wish Dropbox had a lite version which could just sync my files without having to install over 100 MB of useless bloat
- yyx 6y agoIt's called syncthing.
- news_to_me 6y agoSeeing a lot of negativity here re: "Dropbox should just sync files." Personally I'm stoked about Dropbox branching out to help with more aspects of digital organization, and I think they're well-positioned to do it. All that remains is whether or not they can execute that well. Good luck, Dropbox!
- mattgerstman 6y agoThanks so much! We're very excited about our roadmap.
- kakuri 6y agoWhat are the cases where Dropbox works well for people? Years ago I used to regularly have people tell me "my computer is slow, how do I fix it?" I look at their running programs, uninstall Dropbox, and their computer is no longer slow. I hoped maybe a combination of better resource usage by Dropbox and increasing computing power had alleviated that issue, but just the other day another person called me with slowdown issues and sure enough the culprit was Dropbox, which they had just installed.
- mattgerstman 6y agoThis should be substantially better since we shipped our new sync engine https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...
- gerardvivancos 6y agoYou might want to know that Dropbox Passwords hogs the CPU On windows if the browser is running but the Passwords native app is not. You will see high CPU usage from the Windows Delivery Optimization service, but the culprit is DBP whose extension is trying to contact with the host app in a loop, constantly spawning processes that die.
- herf 6y agoI've been disappointed with CPU/battery usage recently. When adding a lot of photos, I have to plug in my laptop--otherwise the battery dies. When uploading a 100MB file on a gen8 Thinkpad: - Dropbox uses 6 minutes of CPU time, basically maxing out a core for the entire upload - offsite scp uses <1 second of CPU, so scp is >100x more efficient than Dropbox - In wall clock time, Dropbox is 4x slower. I imagine their sync problem is very very hard, but but pushing bits up for a large file should be much more efficient.
- mirrormaster 6y agoWhich user asked for a password manager!? When will these companies do real market research
- juandazapata 6y agoI blame the stock market and its unrealistic expectations of infinite growth.
- solarkraft 6y ago> Which user asked for a password manager!? Likely not many, but that's likely at least partly due to a lack of exposure: The market is still severely under-saturated - Everyone should have one, but not that many non-techies do. Thus if you're in a position to make someone try your password manager that may be a serious advantage.
- tomc1985 6y agoAre there any other sync services that can handle large git repos without choking? It's been a few years since I last checked but when I did Dropbox was the only one that didn't choke
- mattgerstman 6y agoHonestly just use GitHub. My (high level) understanding of sync is file system issues file event for every file change, we receive it, determine if its relevant, and then make the appropriate delta. You can imagine with thousands (or millions) of small files this becomes nearly impossible to manage with an OS integrated sync engine.
- tomc1985 6y agoIndeed, and I do/did, but I was in an environment where I would switch quickly between a laptop and a desktop, and Dropbox sync worked extremely well for quickly switching between the same codebase on multiple computers, even with our large, half-a-decade git repo
- Zippogriff 6y agoYou can put the .git directory outside the working directory. Might be helpful. Sync the working dir with a sync service, but the .git dir with... git.
- Dirlewanger 6y agoDitch Dropbox, use something like Syncthing https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- password4321 6y agoIf this is the place to share feature requests, I would like to be able to find the largest files in my Dropbox using the web interface.
- trilinearnz 6y agoI struggled to understand the relevance of Dropbox as soon as the alternatives of Google Drive and OneDrive came on the market with vastly more storage capacity. Is there a sizable market for people who require locally-stored content synchronised to the cloud (e.g. video editors?) Beyond that, the only people I encounter day-to-day who mention Dropbox are those not sufficiently tech-savvy to have known about the free alternatives mentioned above, and are still coasting on Dropbox's first mover awareness advantage.
- rv-de 6y agoI don't want to use Google and onedrive doesn't work seamlessly on Linux and Android.
- ghego1 6y agoMy two cents, thanks for the developers, Dropbox works perfectly and it's hands down the best place to store one's digital life. I am a paying gsuite user, and nevertheless I pay for Dropbox because Google is not even close to where Dropbox is in this area. How to verify this: try to resync every couple of minutes a file of 500mb or more with only few changes on Drive with the sync client, then do the same with Dropbox. Delta syncing in Dropbox is still unbeaten, even by those that claim they have it (Google doesn't to my best knowledge, I think Microsoft introduced it a while ago, but doesn't work as good, try the same test).
- princevegeta89 6y agoWhy doesn't Dropbox have a middle ground solution between free and $15/month for 5TB?! I've been asking myself this question for a long time. Every other cloud storage provider has something like 100GB or 500GB for a nominal 3$ or 5$ per month. Dropbox works really great, but it's painstakingly frustrating that they their barrier to entry is too high that makes non-business users almost give up.
- toyg 6y agoLikely because profit-per-user falls off a cliff very rapidly under $10, due to increased support and admin costs and ballooning storage requirement. They would rather make $12.50 from 1 user than $0.50 from 25 users. Other players have different requirements (most of the value they get is into keeping people locked in their ecosystems).
- civilized 6y agoThe only change I've noticed in Dropbox is it's getting less and less convenient to simply open the Dropbox folder in Finder. They really, really want me to use their fake file browser app thingy, which I loathe
- surlyadopter 6y agoI have been a long-time Dropbox+ (and now Dropbox Family) user. I don't mind so much that it is more expensive than the paid personal G/M offerings. It (usually) just works for me, however over the last year annoyances have crept in. Specifically the new File Explorer interface. It is incredibly slow and inefficient and I curse myself every time I open it instead of through the native Windows File Explorer. Hope that gets fixed soon. That annoyance alone is probably not enough to drive me to another service, assuming other features don't get degraded. Paying 200$ for a product that fights you is not something i plan on doing for a long time...
- eslaught 6y agoWhat stops you from using the normal Windows File Explorer? As far as I know the Dropbox replacement for Explorer is optional.
- surlyadopter 6y agoYes it is, but launching it from the system tray icon forces you to use their interface and it is a pain. Like I said, this specific issue is not a deal breaker, but if their other features take a turn for the worse the way this has then it would be time for a change.
- vertis 6y agoI love some of the Dropbox features, but the thing that annoys me EVERY time I log into their website is that it wants to try and shove team plans in front of me. I actually logged in just before posting to check if it was still there and yep. Giant popup in the corner of the window[1]. I have dismissed these types of notices multiple times. What I don't understand is WHY. Surely it can't be a good idea to harass every one of your individual users to become a business user. [1]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hibz1zkohjnc2ly/Screen%20Shot%202020-09-17%20at%207.36.50%20am.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/hibz1zkohjnc2ly/Screen%20Shot%2020... (yes it did just sync that screenshot to Dropbox).
- daveoc64 6y agoI posted something similar a few months back[1] - since then, I have ditched Dropbox. I felt like they really weren't interested in me as a consumer. I have switched to OneDrive. I already had a subscription to Office 365 (Home), so I've not spent any extra. I can't complain so far. It actually feels like a consumer product. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23797065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23797065