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"Take WhatsApp: the technology behind it is ridiculously simple. " No it is not, when you serve over 100 billion e2e encrspted messages everyday all around the

• toast0 5y ago
  I worked at WhatsApp for almost eight years. It's actually pretty simple behind the covers. Yes, there's a lot of attention to detail and a lot of edge cases that WA covers better than most others, but there's not a lot of truly complex things. It's mostly doing a lot of simple things well (and some amount of picking the right structures to keep things as simple as possible). Often doing things simply means skipping current computing trends. And of course, sometimes doing things simply doesn't actually meet the needs, and may make changes harder later. Of course, Signal has much harder to meet privacy goals and a smaller staff and they didn't build on Erlang, so they're playing on hard mode.