10 ms·

It is actually a fairly indicative story. At the start there is a brilliant individual (Evan) who sets up an entire toolchain + core of the product. They then m

by julik 2y ago

It is actually a fairly indicative story. At the start there is a brilliant individual (Evan) who sets up an entire toolchain + core of the product. They then move on (or get pushed out, or get bored), and with the team (and the product) now being much bigger, things get replatformed to a more familiar, widely used stack. The success of these steps heavily depends on how robust the eng culture is at the organisation. I suspect (no evidence though!) that Evan and other founders have set up an excellent eng culture at Figma and even if they make a mistake at some point, there is sufficient resilience in place to correct. All power to them!

hparadiz 2y ago
It's ironic. For the past 5 years I've been writing type strict PHP. People love to shit on PHP yet I found that when I started using strict types my code quality improved, amount of lines needed to produce a result decreased, and necessary unit tests to produce the same result also decreased. Then a few months ago I decided to write a TS project from scratch. For the record I have 18 years of JavaScript experience. What I found was that the biggest barrier to entry was configuring webpack to be "just right". Other devs on my team with similar level of experience would have their eyes glaze over when webpack came up and get annoyed. For good reason. It took me several days to get it to work right. The fact that the tsconfig has 20 options that can effect the transpiler and not have good docs is a problem. The fact that there needs to be two tsconfigs in a react native project that compiles down to web as a secondary build target is another problem. The fact that you need a very experienced dev to spend days configuring webpack is another problem. Finding information about the right configuration is like the blind leading the blind. Most search results on the topic are riddled with half truths and non sense. Many devs rely on a preexisting webpack config and if they do anything to mess it up they are many times completely unable to fix it. Typescript is fine. I guess. The code produced is nicer. But having to rely on webpack is an issue. I actually like TS but I wish I didn't need to transpile anything or have to bang my head against a webpack config for days. It's by far the biggest barrier to entry because while you're banging your head against it you're not writing code. And for none technical stake holders when you have nothing visual to show at stand ups that can create friction and make the engineers seem like they aren't doing anything. So far at multiple companies I've had to configure webpack for extremely complex JavaScript based single page apps which took me literally months of messing around with it until it worked just right. And until it does work "just right" the non technical folks think you're wasting time.
- julik 2y ago
  Yes, so on the only sizeable TS project I did (which was a library, to be used by other teams) I bypassed webpack entirely and went for a mixture of tsc and esbuild. But knowing to steer clear of webpack (or even - that you can!) is a barrier.
  - iainmerrick 2y ago
    Yep. Webpack is absolutely terrible but still unfortunately seems to have a lot of mindshare.
  - billti 2y ago
    I use TypeScript and esbuild for all my stuff. Even then, I often spend a crazy amount of time getting modules working. Between the various TypeScript module options and various package.json module options (and various code patterns used), modules make JavaScript way more painful than it should be. I think most of the JS language standards work the past 10 years has been awesome, but modules was definitely rushed and poorly thought though, causing years of frustration.
- cageface 2y ago
  Never start with Webpack. Use Vite with a template and go from there.
  - incrudible 2y ago
    Or just go straight to esbuild. I've found vite just makes things more complicated and slower. Particularly, the "smart reloading" breaks in subtle ways and turning every source file into a request doesn't scale well. This can probably be configured away somehow, but again, that just makes things more complicated.
    - CuriouslyC 2y ago
      Remix. Vite done right, mostly pre-configured out of the box.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
I remember when I first read this blog post, https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-system/ https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-sys.... Besides now feeling a bit old realizing this was 5 years ago, I remember thinking what an amazing engineering culture they must have at Figma (besides having a bunch of brilliant people). I mean, they talked about essentially trying out a tech path for a month and then deciding that path was a dead end - I find this so rare in startups where there is a lot of pressure to continually demonstrate "progress". As a corollary, though, I think those kinds of cultures are only possible if your team is composed of primarily brilliant people, because these brilliant people can move faster than most competitors even if they do wander down an unproductive path for a while, and there is total trust that the folks on your team are capable and self-motivated.

by julik 2y ago

hparadiz 2y ago

It's ironic. For the past 5 years I've been writing type strict PHP. People love to shit on PHP yet I found that when I started using strict types my code quality improved, amount of lines needed to produce a result decreased, and necessary unit tests to produce the same result also decreased. Then a few months ago I decided to write a TS project from scratch. For the record I have 18 years of JavaScript experience. What I found was that the biggest barrier to entry was configuring webpack to be "just right". Other devs on my team with similar level of experience would have their eyes glaze over when webpack came up and get annoyed. For good reason. It took me several days to get it to work right. The fact that the tsconfig has 20 options that can effect the transpiler and not have good docs is a problem. The fact that there needs to be two tsconfigs in a react native project that compiles down to web as a secondary build target is another problem. The fact that you need a very experienced dev to spend days configuring webpack is another problem. Finding information about the right configuration is like the blind leading the blind. Most search results on the topic are riddled with half truths and non sense. Many devs rely on a preexisting webpack config and if they do anything to mess it up they are many times completely unable to fix it. Typescript is fine. I guess. The code produced is nicer. But having to rely on webpack is an issue. I actually like TS but I wish I didn't need to transpile anything or have to bang my head against a webpack config for days. It's by far the biggest barrier to entry because while you're banging your head against it you're not writing code. And for none technical stake holders when you have nothing visual to show at stand ups that can create friction and make the engineers seem like they aren't doing anything. So far at multiple companies I've had to configure webpack for extremely complex JavaScript based single page apps which took me literally months of messing around with it until it worked just right. And until it does work "just right" the non technical folks think you're wasting time.

julik 2y ago
Yes, so on the only sizeable TS project I did (which was a library, to be used by other teams) I bypassed webpack entirely and went for a mixture of tsc and esbuild. But knowing to steer clear of webpack (or even - that you can!) is a barrier.
- iainmerrick 2y ago
  Yep. Webpack is absolutely terrible but still unfortunately seems to have a lot of mindshare.
- billti 2y ago
  I use TypeScript and esbuild for all my stuff. Even then, I often spend a crazy amount of time getting modules working. Between the various TypeScript module options and various package.json module options (and various code patterns used), modules make JavaScript way more painful than it should be. I think most of the JS language standards work the past 10 years has been awesome, but modules was definitely rushed and poorly thought though, causing years of frustration.
cageface 2y ago
Never start with Webpack. Use Vite with a template and go from there.
- incrudible 2y ago
  Or just go straight to esbuild. I've found vite just makes things more complicated and slower. Particularly, the "smart reloading" breaks in subtle ways and turning every source file into a request doesn't scale well. This can probably be configured away somehow, but again, that just makes things more complicated.
  - CuriouslyC 2y ago
    Remix. Vite done right, mostly pre-configured out of the box.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

I remember when I first read this blog post, https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-system/ https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-sys.... Besides now feeling a bit old realizing this was 5 years ago, I remember thinking what an amazing engineering culture they must have at Figma (besides having a bunch of brilliant people). I mean, they talked about essentially trying out a tech path for a month and then deciding that path was a dead end - I find this so rare in startups where there is a lot of pressure to continually demonstrate "progress". As a corollary, though, I think those kinds of cultures are only possible if your team is composed of primarily brilliant people, because these brilliant people can move faster than most competitors even if they do wander down an unproductive path for a while, and there is total trust that the folks on your team are capable and self-motivated.