Comment by exclipy
12 hours ago
I jumped from Google to Facebook on 2019 and while I had thought Google had best in industry developer tooling, Facebook had it better.
Google’s dinky browser based Cider was cute but Facebook in its transition from Atom to VS Code was far ahead. Google might have invented asynchronous web based code review with Mondrian and Critique, but Facebook’s Diff was better with its stacked diff support. Google’s Buganizer was outdated and clunky compared to Facebook’s Tasks.
I left Facebook the year after but I do wonder where Meta’s tooling is up to nowadays. Is it still a glimpse of the future?
Oh yeah, not to mention the drag and drop GUI mercurial client in the IDE. I still haven’t seen anything as good on the outside.
Regular engineers could use stacked diffs proficiently and regularly, without it being seen as a super advanced 10x engineer power user thing.
And the instant start cloud dev servers complete with shareable full stack preview links! Chefs kiss
I left Google end of 2022, but we already had the mentioned new version of Cider based on VS Code for a few years before that. It's possible FB did it first, but I don't think Google was far behind at all. I'm fairly certain there was the new VSCode based Cider by early 2020. Certainly was by end of 2020 and entirely common by the time I left.
(I didn't get to use it much because I worked on embedded stuff that was on the Chromium stack and in git, not in Google3)
Buganizer (v1 and v2) was delightfully primitive and simple. That was the point. PMs couldn't play games with it.