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If you look at https://www.infoq.com/presentations/whatsapp-scalability/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/whatsapp-scalability/ though it gives a very differ

by btown 5y ago

If you look at https://www.infoq.com/presentations/whatsapp-scalability/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/whatsapp-scalability/ though it gives a very different picture. Sure, the founding team may have tried to prototype without knowing full technical details, but they knew enough to choose software that could fundamentally scale towards the future, and they rapidly brought on fantastically talented developers with a hunger for optimization. You can't choose the right technical people without technical chops; that being said, in many cases the right technical people are those who know how and when (and when not) to stand on the shoulders of giants!

AshamedCaptain 5y ago
It doesn't look like "they knew enough to choose software that could fundamentally scale". It looks more like they choose the first option that was available to them. Apple also choose XMPP for Facetime as did a million other companies that serve similar scales of simultaneous clients. They may have hired people later on (though this entire article is kind of showing that no, they actually didn't hire that much technical people). But by the time they even hired the first Erlang engineer they had already won over the European market. And for the record it was not precisely due to the quality of either their Android or iOS android apps -- the J2ME and Symbian clients had quite a following and I would even bet were more used. Original Whatsapp was a disaster and this did not prevent them from gaining marketshare. You could basically login as anyone just by having their phone number (which maps to their JID) and defeating their XMPP obfuscation layer (some XML encoding, which was easily done due to the easily RE Java clients). It was only later on (2011ish?) that they started getting somewhat serious, which coincided with them, already swimming in users (and money?), starting to get more evil (with a more hardcore stance against 3rd party clients).

by btown 5y ago

AshamedCaptain 5y ago

It doesn't look like "they knew enough to choose software that could fundamentally scale". It looks more like they choose the first option that was available to them. Apple also choose XMPP for Facetime as did a million other companies that serve similar scales of simultaneous clients. They may have hired people later on (though this entire article is kind of showing that no, they actually didn't hire that much technical people). But by the time they even hired the first Erlang engineer they had already won over the European market. And for the record it was not precisely due to the quality of either their Android or iOS android apps -- the J2ME and Symbian clients had quite a following and I would even bet were more used. Original Whatsapp was a disaster and this did not prevent them from gaining marketshare. You could basically login as anyone just by having their phone number (which maps to their JID) and defeating their XMPP obfuscation layer (some XML encoding, which was easily done due to the easily RE Java clients). It was only later on (2011ish?) that they started getting somewhat serious, which coincided with them, already swimming in users (and money?), starting to get more evil (with a more hardcore stance against 3rd party clients).