Comment by v0idzer0
4 years ago
I usually bite my tongue when these articles pop up weekly, but let’s ask ourselves a question: did Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc all make a terrible engineering mistake? Or did this guy with a blog miss something?
I’ve recently worked on converting a large code base to an SPA and the improvements in DX, UX and performance are enormous. Even the old timers that resisted the project have all come around.
This doesn’t mean your blog should be an SPA. It shouldn’t. but reducing the valid use cases for them to Youtube is equally ignorant.
I generally agree they are being overly applied, but that’s not an indictment on the technology whatsoever. Fads in technology happen (“rewrite it in rust” is a recent one). The fact that many people are falling into this fad says nothing about Rust as a technology other than people love it enough to overuse it.
> did Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc all make a terrible engineering mistake? Or did this guy with a blog miss something?
Today I opened the Music app on my Mac to cancel a subscription. It asked me to use Touch ID to authenticate (fair enough) but then immediately fell back to asking me for my Apple ID & password.
This is on a Mac that's been logged into iCloud for ages, has a working iCloud connection (exchanged some files through it today) and I installed an app from the App Store today (without being asked to reauth, suggesting my session is indeed still valid).
The fact that MacOS frequently asks for Apple ID credentials seems to be a common and widespread problem that I myself experienced for years (sadly this occurrence wasn't a surprise for me - if anything the initial Touch ID prompt was more surprising as I couldn't believe it would actually not ask me for my password this time), so I wouldn't use big names as a sign of quality - if anything it's the opposite, big names means lots of employees who might have their own reasons for doing certain things or preserving a status-quo that might benefit them & their careers at the expense of the user experience.
> did Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc all make a terrible engineering mistake?
Is that so impossible? There are many other considerations that go into technology choices at these companies. There are trade-offs involved, and for companies with huge teams of developers the considerations need to be very different than for small–medium sized groups of developers.
I would argue that a smaller group of developers can focus much more on user experience and engineering efficiency, whereas a large company has a organisational scaling issues and a significant bureaucracy to support. At a large company, engineering considerations come second to very many things. It would actually be surprising if the trade-offs and choices those companies made were correct for other very different companies.