50 billion per day means all of the one-in-a-million edge cases will hit you 50 thousand times a day.

truly terrifying

nice way to put it

yet shit happens and things doesn't work so it's accurate lol

no but maybe

They found all the mythical 10x engineers, captured them, and locked them in a basement with only laptops with Linux terminals and a mountain of anime pron to keep them company Those engineers have never been more happy

They are running FreeBSD. Not Linux.

lmao

... with monochrome screens and Vi as editor...

😂😂😂

No, they found Erlang

Being rejected by a company, just to be bought out by the same company, is so vindicating

he probably didn't know how to reverse a linked-list

lol @@mrlectus

A manager went to the Master Programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the Master: "How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?" "It will take one year," said the Master promptly. "But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?" The Master Programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take two years." "And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?" The Master Programmer shrugged. "Then the design will never be completed," he said.

the tao of programming is a masterpiece

Just a tiny technicality; Erlang uses "green" processes rather than green threads. Difference is that threads can share state, memory and address spaces, processes are isolated and share nothing (other than by copying values). Erlang implements its processes in its runtime system and is managed in its VM, rather than using OS threads or processes.

So are you saying that I should start to use Erlang?

Basically Erlang FORBIDS mutable state (stored in RAM)

@@SeanPoulter Its amazing how easy is to create massively scalable things with Erlang, like most of the heavy lifting is really the programming paradigm. I was reading the Ejjaberd source code and I was impressed how little code in relation to the runtime is necessary to create the core of what is Whatsapp.

Try doing that with C you might save a lot of memory, but you lose all scaling as well. Its almost like C is cheating by being unsafe with its memory model full of aliasing and sharing via the use of pointers. You are also going to need 35.000 engineers because C is a shit programming language that requires a lot of stupid work to manage the memory. Its ironic that computer were invented to automate industrial process, yet, the very own engineers working with computers decided to not industrialize the most boring and stupid programming task : managing memory. All because in 1970, the PDP11 only have like 8Kb of RAM or something... But Erlang coming from the telephony world don't use memory to process data, only to control process that control the data flowing in actual wires, that's the magic. Its the control-plane/data-plane separation. Stored program with mutable shared memory and big linear address space was a mistake, and its not even how hardware works anymore anyways, the so called "C" programmers don't even program bare-metal anymore, its all a fad, its only there for their ego or something, that a modern compiler has to make a modern computer look like a 1970's era PDP11. And we are forever going to be stuck in this memory model thanks to C and Unix and Intel.

That article screams AI generated. It describes a bunch of generic best practice things that you would expect from any succesful company.

For context about FreeBSD, because the article skims over it: For years Erlang developers preferred FreeBSD because IO multiplexing is done in FreeBSD with something called kqueue, which requires one less syscall than the Linux equivalent (epoll). I believe Linux has iouring now. Let us just appreciate for a moment that the Erlang VM handles IO so well that the OPERATING SYSTEM ITSELF BECOMES THE BOTTLENECK.

BSD also allows running programs in the kernel memory space.

​@@stevenhe3462but shouldn't that also be a security issue?

@@ummijaan1448 not if you know what a computer is

@@qwoolrat sorry bro i thought I knew what a computer is but turns out I don't. Sorry for wasting your time.

Signal is fantastic, I absolutely love it. I wish more people were using it though

Just do a sponsored ad bro 😂

agreed

Yeah I want to use it as well. But tell that to my fam, my friends and co-workers lol

I was expecting more from the article tbh. Yeah, it lists some things, but it's just a lists of concepts that by now I think it's just standard good practices. (Aside from the lang choice and fBSD OS choice). I was expecting the article to go a little deeper. It's nice to know that they located and fix bottlenecks, but I wanted to know, how they identified, what was the issue and how that got fixed.

yeah, like, do they store the messages in a txt? how do they query that volume of data? that would be interesting to know

Exactly it was so generic, it was like someone had an assignment to write a 500 words essay

Fear of telling too much and then having the information used against you later; fear of clones; industrial secret; or it just takes too much effort to ask the techs how shit is actually working.

Having worked at Ericsson, I can tell you that they mostly dont use Erlang these days. Where I worked there was a lot of Scala and Akka, which is funny to me. One really cool feature of Erlang is that they could predict the amount of hardware needed. X amount of messages means Y hardware requirements, 2X messages 2Y hardware. But the coolest feature has to be the suicide pacts of processes

Akka is cool, if only wasn't running under JVM, and if I'm not wrong is just replicating what Erlang already does. Can't figure out why would they do that.

oh yeah I remember the suicide pacts -- 'links'.

And where are you working now? Or are you retiredd

@@bacon-SG It's mainly funny to me because the Scala/Akka people often talk about Erlangs influence on them. But I agree, Akka is cool

When you don't have useless managers in between engineers can work like cake.

I think perhaps another advantage that WhatsApp has (or had) was lack or server side storage? Generally messages were just sent and lived on client devices. When you went to a new device, if you didn't do a transfer yourself, you'd start fresh. I'm sure there was temporary storage but when you can cut out those huge database challenges you can save more engineering resources

Joe Armstrong is such an inspirational talker and person. In many ways whatsapp was the perfect showcase of the core ideas of what Erlang was designed for. Instant messaging needs to be low latency, highly reliable and capable of handling partial failures. And it was pretty well defined: Do SMS but over IP, with few new capabilities such as user-defined profile pictures.

RIP

Thank you for showing where that meme came from, and the potential rapidity of meme generation and sharing. Love it! Am familiar with GIMP but your demo (about halfway through) produced much faster results.

Erlang is all about creating robust distributed systems as seamlessly as possible. The fact that it is functional and you can hot reload is secondary.

While Erlang is functional it is perhaps the least important fact about the language and given the syntax and style of Erlang it is very procedural feeling. I find C/C++/Go/Java devs have little issue moving to it once getting used to replacing loops with maps, folds, and tail recursive functions.

Maps as in applying functions to iterable objects? I learned that Go call key/val pairs for maps after i learned that - So i'm wondering what the actual norm of maps actually is

@@GOTHICforLIFE1 Both are map, same word used for different things. But I would say more people would use map for applying a function to every element of a collection and call an associative array a dictionary.

It's the features around concurrency and distributing work between multiple machines that makes Erlang so great. I absolutely hate the syntax though

​@@JeremyNicollReally? I like its relative simplicity. It might be inspired by a rather unpopular and odd language (Prolog) I really never minded it. I certainly prefer it over a number of other functional languages... including OCaml. I think the pattern matching syntax is the nicest I've seen in any language.

We have a very serious communication problem in our "team" right now. I put "team" in quotes because it's actually about 50 people in six work streams that are identical. It's so bad that I can't make any breaking changes to our API at all since it is practically IMPOSSIBLE to communicate with everyone involved in a certain feature since there is no central person who knows who is working on what since the six work streams actually all do the same thing and work on the same code base.

I love that he got rejected by Facebook, then they acquired his company --7 years later for billions... I've heard it described before as the "most expensive hire ever" 😅

Feature creep can be harder than people think. One of the reasons why Linux is a thing, was Linus understanding that there has to be someone with power to say "No" to anything proposed.

okay I think I still am a javascript advocate but @ThePrimeTime is like the Red pill I needed because "You just pushed back 591 messages because you were off by a half millisecond"

One important thing the author has missed: FreeBSD. it was very important for them to run FreeBSD for two reasons. 1. The co-founders were very familiar with the internals of FreeBSD. 2. The FreeBSD network stack was (and still is) way better than other open-source operating systems (e.g. Linux). They were able to support 2-3 million concurrent connections on a single commodity server.

hah, turns out the author DID mention FreeBSD :D should've watched the video completely before commenting :D

Would have been cool to see some specifics on bottlenecks and stuff.

1:40 I still don't understand why YUI was not maintained. I mean NodeJS and React and all that are good, but nothing beats a well designed, single-source comprehensive JS framework. It was the JDK of Javascript.

Prime on CI/CD: "Everyone does that." (2008 btw) On the other end, here I am, trying to convince the company to let me implement pipelines in the repos while waiting for my boss to "deploy" with one-week delays using a copy-paste bash script, saying that it's good enough: 🤡

😂😂

I think that most shops should probably have between 3 and 40 devs depending on the depth of their app ecosystem. It doesn't make sense to have 600 or 40000 developers. That makes communication impossible...

Some projects have such a large scope that you need a team for every stream. And thus, you get 20 teams and can't figure out who owns which feature

@@dejangegic I disagree. I’ve been to big and small firms. You don’t need that many devs. You need better leadership.

Behold the power of Erlang and Elixir. Functional programming is the future.

You know what’s really funny about that? That’s how programming kind of started in the first place.

early days yahoo engineers had to work without repacked infrastructure On the least capable hardware so that's why they had to write optimally in their code and architecture Must have been efficient simple and capable

That article felt very superficial, just listing the tech stack and common good practices. Does 32 engineers include mobile devs though? Really impressive if so, cause at first they even had Symbian and Blackberry support. To be sure, they've had some embarrassing problems with encryption at first, and Zuck seems to have found a selling price for Jan's idealism. Nowadays, their desktop app is total crap. I only have a few groups with old friends, not even any large or active channels, and it on an older macbook I sometimes use, after a couple weeks it takes couple of minutes to start up, with 160% cpu. Goodness knows what it's doing, it's maybe 500 messages at most, and it's not even rendering anything apart from a progress bar. Seriously, just doing math wth cores and cpu cycles per message hints at some monumental idiocy happening.

I have a theory that pretty much any scale of software system can be produced if you stick just a handful of engineers in a couple of rooms. If it's a hard problem, give them £300k plus and hire the very best. It will still work out cheaper than 200 drones grinding away in their corporate cubicles. The effort of coordinating all those low skilled hacks and the quality control bureaucracy you'll need will cost far more than simply hiring good people in the first place.

I will follow this advice for my company, seems sensible and feasible,

where are they paying that kind of money in europe? lol

@@bos9824 According to the stats, £300k is around the median for a top-tier engineer in the US and £250k in the EU. If you want the best of the best, you'd have to pay a bit more than the median.

I'm surprised this article didn't mention aggregators, since WhatsApp pays Infobip for monitoring, filtering, and managing the loads on their traffic through special routes made for WhatsApp which are configured according to their requirements. WhatsApp doesn't do all of the job with 32 engineers, they're smart about outsourcing things when possible.

Turns out (as somebody mentioned in the chat) that Jan Koum is actually Ukrainian. It's the English transliteration that makes it look absolutely non-Ukrainian (I thought he's Chinese, lol) P.S. You read the name correctly, and the surname -is more like Koom ("oo" as in "door")-

well lets go!

@@ThePrimeTimeagen oops, I meant Kum as in "could" (and that's probably why it's Koum). My English breaks at evenings...

this was enjoyable for normal people lol, good job prime

@7:40 No, not really green threads. That article misrepresents what is going on in Erlang. Erlang is using actor processes and has practically a full OS like process scheduler. And because it is built into the language and platform it offers features not found elsewhere and often can't be found elsewhere when the feature is an afterthought.

Erlang was specifically designed to ensure reliable operation in network and telecom applications, so yeah... makes sense.

At netflix you had less than 2000 engineers. That's not a comparison, you had 2 orders of magnitude more engineers

Wow, that means each engineer handled 1.5 billion messages just by himself. Must have taken him ALL DAY!

Simple: make a stable application on stable server platforms. You really don’t need thousands of engineers for applications that are that simple. I struggle to understand why even Netflix requires hundreds of engineers full time.

netflix has many applications that arent public facing thats why

Telegram is great too without group size limitations like WhatsApp. Wonder how they engineered it.

YES!!!! Love the shout out to Signal at the end. It is the best messenger there is, light-years beyond everything else. ❤❤❤❤❤

another thing about yahoo engeneers , of all the big name .commers, they were the only ones toe also register bitflip domain names , where the rest only rigistered the typo domain names ... they foresaw and closed that vulnerability long before anyone ever came up with abusing it

3:33 - True, with all due respect, at the end of the day it is a messaging app with not a whole lot of features. By its very nature it is easy to parallelize and scale. Most messages are sent between 2 people and the group limit is 1024 (compared to other apps such as Telegram which support 200.000 or Discord which supports 250.000 members or more). The app existed for over 14 years now, so plenty of development time went into it already. 32 engineers (especially talented ones) is a lot for a problem as narrow as this. Past a certain point you simply can't split responsibilities anymore and you don't wanna end up having 3 senior engineers solely responsible for styling the Send button.

There wasn't 32 people just for the client, aws didn't exist, and docker/kubernetes wasn't a thing

Amazing things can be done with a small self-directed team. But I question if all the things listed actually helped. Maybe they felt like they helped, but did they really? Maybe these 8 reasons were actually slowing them down but the team was so good it didn't matter. Or maybe it did help after all. Attempts have been made to study software development practices but it is very hard. Just don't put too much trust on your feelings over what works or not.

Yahoo brickhouse (and the groups right around there) had the most influential people ever. I wanted to work there SO badly in the early 2000s!

Signal's UI looks like Fisher-Price, though. Can't get myself to use it, let alone convince others which is always a problem when switching a messaging app.

The reason the are able to do that is precisely because they only have 32 engineers.

The ONE THING BUILT WELL from Amazon was the idea behind AWS. Amazon the shop is just a (self paying) self Advertising for AWS 😉

Bruh you’re the doc of the programmer stream world 😂

BOE THAT WAS FUNNY kkkkkkkkkkkkkk thanks for the great article, as always

1:20 "He double hockey sticks" is the most Flanders statement I've ever heard 😂

That’s a cool blog post because it shows a text book development of a product.

I watched the video just to see when FreeBSD is mentioned in the article. It’s one big reason of the performance !

yeah, i have heard many a good things about it. i also know we use it extensively on our own boxes at netflix

Yeah the network stack is blazing

Normally I have to pay for it. Thanks for letting me know about FreeBDSM

the programm has been pretty much the same since years. those engineers basically camping on their 500k salary :)

SMS in Ukraine is still expensive. We pay for every 100-200 messages, depending on provider. And 100 messages is equivalent in price to 50Gb of internet, on my provider.

Why are you still paying for them?

But no one uses them

There was Douglas Crockford gutting javascript and scavenging the good parts.

+1 For name butchering 😅 Excellent points and great vid // A fellow Jan

hello jan

@@ThePrimeTimeagen And yes, you were totally right it is [Swedish chef voice] ”Jaan”. Ironically, have also worked with actual SMS protocols, Erlang/RabbitMQ stack back in the day. And these theoughputs are damn impressive. No similar B$ exit story tho.. 😅

That German impression made me chuckle. Uncancellable.

You're name made me chuckle, as well.

This is one of your best videos, and Flip as well.

A $35 raspberry pi can send 100 million message sends a second. It's not the software engineers thats the muscle behind this.ok partly the Linux kernel and os coders

It's easy when you don't over engineer the way FAANG does

We must opose "10x engineers" !!!! It impossible !!! "16x engineers" or "8x engineers" that are only allowed options for IT engineers !!!

everyone has green threads because they were copying Erlang, even the Go guys knew about Erlang but Erlang is even better than Go, Rob Pike also recommends Erlang. Erlang code always lives in a green thread, and all of their green threads are individual erlang runtimes with their own heap so when you kill one of them you are automatically collecting garbage, giving Erlang "arenas" by default. Erlang's hot reloading works due to always running on a green thread, because they can load v1 and v1.1 in different threads, last time I checked it had only support for 2 simultaneous versions.

Erlang code lives in Erlang processes (or "green processes") since they are isolated and cannot share state, unlike threads.

I know it, Elixir is the way to go!, long live to Erlang!

I find Erlang syntax SO much better, is Elixir really he future? I have to make this choice.

is it faster than Erlang?

Instructions unclear accidentally learnt Go

fun fact: WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol. At least it did before Facebook aqcuired it.

"classic 2008, everyone was there" 1:13 - I don't know why this cracked me up so much

Now they are adding all kinds of unnecessary features turning it into a social media of some sort

The awkward moment when Prime finds out Jan Koum is Ukrainian will be grand

Signal is great! Donate if you can to keep it running!

Whatsapp is the result of when you put curious and smart people in room together

4 devops , 4 developer , architect , CTO, 2 QA and 20 other who do nothing :).

This title sounds funny. Imagine 32 engineers sitting here and manually sending all those messages. And also it's sad that Telegram now goes on this path of "feature creep". It was a wonderful messenger and now it's full of social networking shit.

signal is the way

Telegram was always apooky

As a german I really appreciated you saying Ja 😍

But yeah good video. And yes, FP shines through baby ❤

This guy just turned into Arnold Schwarzenegger the second he did a german accent.

The saddest part of this video Yahoo being king of the internet and somehow losing everything

1:30, it is a thing! yahoo used to have all the best engineers!

It really isnt that big a deal. I mean maybe it is if youre a js developer, but not if youre normal.

The Arnold accent killed me

When you and your family are LatAm, you cant really say no to Whatsapp unfortunately. Signal is awesome, but god be damned if you aren't in the family whatsapp for your grandma's daily drop of prayer chains

Elixir é Brasil, é Valindo ^^ es number one.

Wait until he learns WA uses Signal's encryption

Not a lot. Internal flows in performant architectures push upwards of 10 million/second PER CORE. Couple with kernel bypass networking and 50 billion a day is something you can actually do on a single server.

Yeah you're not gonna connect 450 million daily active users to a single machine

He clearly didn't do enough leet puzzles to get into facebook. That's probably what happened.

Most of YC's original partners were from Yahoo too.

That "Jan Koum" sounded familiar so googled it. He is actually ukrainian. What a coincidence.

The wild thing - mesage with Whatsapp API cost more than a SMS

post makes it sound like the engineers hand delivered each message

SMS were so expensive in Brazil back then that even now that it is cheap people only use WhatsApp. And some of less tech ones savvy don’t event know what an sms is

huehue brbr

Small team of 32 engineers 💀👀

4:02 i love that comment.. The difference between 32 and 2000 is about 2000

4:46 this is pure gold. Lmao

Love that ending.

The german accent was beautiful

Its annoying how now SMS and calls are free and instead data costs loads of money

Most of those 50 billion messages are "Good Mornings!" and replies from India.

Feature creep is literally all whatsapp is now that facebook took over lol

haha nice German accent try, but he is Ukranian ahaha. wondered how you would do Ukranian accent in this case. sweet prime

because yahoo engineers basically invented the modern internet :)

Signal is good but the other person also needs to use that.

meaning 7 billion people is using whatsapp and sending like every 2 hours? i don't think so

8:34 “Edge lord with a beard.” Got em. Rekt.