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The Guardian web site has/used to have a warning displayed for articles of a certain age. This would apply here. The article is from 2015. Close to irrelevant,

The Guardian web site has/used to have a warning displayed for articles of a certain age. This would apply here. The article is from 2015. Close to irrelevant, alas.

vladsanchez 4y ago
If they're still powered by the same Erlang codebase, it's STILL VERY RELEVANT. Read https://wiredelta.com/how-was-whatsapp-developed/ https://wiredelta.com/how-was-whatsapp-developed/ and let me know. ;)
- jterrys 4y ago
  Seems like an uptick in Erlang articles recently. It's interesting how some users seem scared of the language, despite it being so pervasive. I know Discord as an example heavily relies on it.
  - foepys 4y ago
    There was a wave of Elixir articles a few years ago when it was a hot topic. People were always fascinated by Erlang (or rather the underlying BEAM) but it never really broke into the mainstream, probably because it is so different.
PeterisP 4y ago
It's still very relevant because if it was possible to provide a billion-user scale service with 50 engineers with 2015 tech, then it's an indicator to others that it is possible to do the same today.
- threeseed 4y ago
  You can do this today with 1 engineer and a cloud provider. It's pretty trivial these days. The hard part is making this a successful business. Because the minute you try and monetise it with advertising you will quickly find out that building a competitive ad platform is where the real challenge is.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > You can do this today with 1 engineer and a cloud provider. It's pretty trivial these days No, you can't. If it really is trivial today, it was in 2015: cloud providers already existed, smartphones already existed, programming tools were already more than mature, anybody could run a few instances of ejabberd and build an app to talk to them. WhatsApp image upload used a simple PHP page... It wasn't exactly rocket science, it was simply very well executed.
  - bsaul 4y ago
    you would be surprised by how much work an e2e chat application with the quality of whatsapp requires. Doing a crappy chat app, yes sure that's easy. But one that works as reliably, with the general performance of whatsapp ? Even with today's tech, that's super hard.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> The article is from 2015. Close to irrelevant, alas. so things become irrelevant after 7 years now? will this comment be irrelevant in 7 years?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
TigerTeamX 4y ago
I'd say even more relevant. Why? Because 7 years ago our scaling/technology was worse than what we potentially can do now. If you want you can scale with a small team if you focus on the actual problems instead of overengineering

The Guardian web site has/used to have a warning displayed for articles of a certain age. This would apply here. The article is from 2015. Close to irrelevant, alas.

vladsanchez 4y ago

If they're still powered by the same Erlang codebase, it's STILL VERY RELEVANT. Read https://wiredelta.com/how-was-whatsapp-developed/ https://wiredelta.com/how-was-whatsapp-developed/ and let me know. ;)

jterrys 4y ago
Seems like an uptick in Erlang articles recently. It's interesting how some users seem scared of the language, despite it being so pervasive. I know Discord as an example heavily relies on it.
- foepys 4y ago
  There was a wave of Elixir articles a few years ago when it was a hot topic. People were always fascinated by Erlang (or rather the underlying BEAM) but it never really broke into the mainstream, probably because it is so different.

PeterisP 4y ago

It's still very relevant because if it was possible to provide a billion-user scale service with 50 engineers with 2015 tech, then it's an indicator to others that it is possible to do the same today.

threeseed 4y ago
You can do this today with 1 engineer and a cloud provider. It's pretty trivial these days. The hard part is making this a successful business. Because the minute you try and monetise it with advertising you will quickly find out that building a competitive ad platform is where the real challenge is.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > You can do this today with 1 engineer and a cloud provider. It's pretty trivial these days No, you can't. If it really is trivial today, it was in 2015: cloud providers already existed, smartphones already existed, programming tools were already more than mature, anybody could run a few instances of ejabberd and build an app to talk to them. WhatsApp image upload used a simple PHP page... It wasn't exactly rocket science, it was simply very well executed.
- bsaul 4y ago
  you would be surprised by how much work an e2e chat application with the quality of whatsapp requires. Doing a crappy chat app, yes sure that's easy. But one that works as reliably, with the general performance of whatsapp ? Even with today's tech, that's super hard.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> The article is from 2015. Close to irrelevant, alas. so things become irrelevant after 7 years now? will this comment be irrelevant in 7 years?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

TigerTeamX 4y ago

I'd say even more relevant. Why? Because 7 years ago our scaling/technology was worse than what we potentially can do now. If you want you can scale with a small team if you focus on the actual problems instead of overengineering