3 ms·

Geniuses, maybe, but also exceedingly lucky - right place, right time, right idea, right connections etc :)

brutus1213 6y ago
The tech behind whatsapp was pretty cool IIRC .. that's how I got interested in Erlang/Beam. These people were not your average CS grad or even your average googler.
- patrickaljord 6y ago
  WhatsApp could have been coded in any language. The first version was a very simple app but it promised free SMS alternative with some great marketing campaign. Still amazing how they managed to grow the user base using this marketing when there were tons of apps doing the same thing.
  - drevil-v2 6y ago
    Where can I read more about this?
    - brutus1213 6y ago
      http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2012-whatsapp-scaling.pdf http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2...
  - brutus1213 6y ago
    I don't believe the backend would be as scalable (with the same amount of ease) on JVM (Akka) or straight C/C++. Erlang, Beam bring a lot of value to the table for this specific application: http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2012-whatsapp-scaling.pdf http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2... Also, I got interested in Elixir/Phoenix after I learned about what WhatsApp accomplished. I'm a bit surprised people are downvoting a technical point on HN but whatever.
- jeffnappi 6y ago
  The brilliance wasn't in building the core software but rather leveraging the right technology for scalable low cost messaging. WhatsApp's core messaging infrastructure is built on top of a modified version of the open source project Ejabberd. The technology heavy lifting has largely been done by Erlang and Ejabberd. In my opinion WhatsApp was brilliant to leverage those existing systems - but it wasn't the computer science skills that made them successful.
  - brutus1213 6y ago
    I thought they did some fine tuning to the BEAM VM to get an extreme amount of scale. I didn't know people had Ejabberd deployments at such high scale (2 million+ concurrent connections per server) in that time period. I never got into details of scaling XMPP so you might be right.

The tech behind whatsapp was pretty cool IIRC .. that's how I got interested in Erlang/Beam. These people were not your average CS grad or even your average googler.

patrickaljord 6y ago
WhatsApp could have been coded in any language. The first version was a very simple app but it promised free SMS alternative with some great marketing campaign. Still amazing how they managed to grow the user base using this marketing when there were tons of apps doing the same thing.
- drevil-v2 6y ago
  Where can I read more about this?
  - brutus1213 6y ago
    http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2012-whatsapp-scaling.pdf http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2...
- brutus1213 6y ago
  I don't believe the backend would be as scalable (with the same amount of ease) on JVM (Akka) or straight C/C++. Erlang, Beam bring a lot of value to the table for this specific application: http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2012-whatsapp-scaling.pdf http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2... Also, I got interested in Elixir/Phoenix after I learned about what WhatsApp accomplished. I'm a bit surprised people are downvoting a technical point on HN but whatever.
jeffnappi 6y ago
The brilliance wasn't in building the core software but rather leveraging the right technology for scalable low cost messaging. WhatsApp's core messaging infrastructure is built on top of a modified version of the open source project Ejabberd. The technology heavy lifting has largely been done by Erlang and Ejabberd. In my opinion WhatsApp was brilliant to leverage those existing systems - but it wasn't the computer science skills that made them successful.
- brutus1213 6y ago
  I thought they did some fine tuning to the BEAM VM to get an extreme amount of scale. I didn't know people had Ejabberd deployments at such high scale (2 million+ concurrent connections per server) in that time period. I never got into details of scaling XMPP so you might be right.