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I'm not saying it's a fair metric, but when I compare Twitter's open output to similarly VC-funded-but-now-public companies, the engineering output doesn't seem
by carbonatedmilk 4y ago
I'm not saying it's a fair metric, but when I compare Twitter's open output to similarly VC-funded-but-now-public companies, the engineering output doesn't seem particularly exciting.
For comparison:
Meta / Facebook:
* React
* PyTorch
* Fasttext
* Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program
Google:
* Flutter
* Go
* Kubernetes
* Tensorflow
* BERT / Large language models generally
* Mapreduce / Hadoop
The much-maligned Uber:
* H3 Geospatial indexing
* Kepler.gl
* Manifold
Even AirBNB!
* Airflow
* Superset
I use most of these products (or their descendants) every day in my work.
When I think of Twitter, all I think of is how they arbitrarily shut off humanitarian access to their APIs (and earlier, the Twitter firehose). There's not a single Twitter-supported open product that I use.
Am I the only one? Is there a great Twitter-supported project that I missed?
- antirez 4y agoPellican (caching system), Bootstarp, their unique IDs system, a few more.
- _rs 4y agoBootstrap, though it has been a long time since I’ve used it (and I don’t know if they actively support it)
- doitLP 4y agoBootstrap! It’s the only one I could think of but it certainly had a big impact on lots of people, enabling a lot of devs who were bad at design and responsiveness to make halfway decent looking websites.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago> Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program I'm pretty sure almost all of this team was laid off (certainly the people I knew who worked on it were). > * Airflow This is actually a clone of an internal FB tool (written by the same author after he left FB).
- carbonatedmilk 4y ago> I'm pretty sure almost all of this team was laid off (certainly the people I knew who worked on it were). That's really sad news. The crew I interacted with (Alex, Omari, Tobias, others) were top-flight engineers who also really understood the problem space and how to navigate the internal complexities of Meta. Hope the laid off / repositioned staff are OK, and if they're looking for new opportunities my email's in my profile.
- sciurus 4y agoSee https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1592774269733601281 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1592774269733601281 for some of the examples of technical innovation at Twitter.
- maltalex 4y agoHow many of these innovations have been open sourced?
- Keyframe 4y agoThey could've supported bootstrap more than they did, right?
- rilut 4y ago+ Presto from Facebook
- jsiepkes 4y agoTwitter developed Finagle, which led to Linkerd. Twitter did a whole bunch of pioneering of service mesh related technologies.
- matwood 4y agoYears ago they did snowflake, a distributed ID generation library, that I used. They retired it long ago though.