dandi8

Kinda disappointing. I was hoping for a single-player-focused title.

First part of the article sounds like what I’d expect.

The second part makes me wonder if this research was sponsored by some company which provides “Prompt Engineering” training.

Joplin itself is AGPL. Unfortunately, Joplin Server is under “JOPLIN SERVER PERSONAL USE LICENSE”.

While I really like Joplin, I’m thinking of making the switch to something fully open source.

Hopefully this will enrage the users enough to go and actually vote against Trump.

I don’t think source-available licenses have any chance of outcompeting open source, or at least I hope developers won’t let them.

Open source thrives on contributions. The moment you restrict what I can do with the software I’m supposed to contribute to is the moment I ask myself: “am I being asked to work for free, solely for the benefit of someone else?”.

The incentive to contribute completely disappears (at least to me) when I’m asked to do it for a project which “belongs to someone in particular”.

Does this really make it any less worthy of criticism, though…?

Interesting! Out of curiosity, what is the source? Is there a breakdown per role?

It’s no more a risk than throwing more developers at it when they’re not needed.

“Too many devs“ can, and often is, a significant bottleneck in and of itself. The codebase may simply not be big enough to fit more.

Besides, I still don’t see what all those additional engineers would actually be doing. “Responding to incidents” presupposes a large number of incidents. In other words, the assumption is that the application will be buggy, or insecure enough, that 30 engineers will not be enough to apply the duct tape. I stand by the claim that an application adhering to modern standards and practices will not have as many bugs or security breaches, and therefore 30 engineers sounds like a completely reasonable amount.

I have no idea why you’re even bringing up OT. We’re not talking about PLCs or scientific equipment here, we’re talking about glorified web apps.

Web apps that need to be secure and highly available, for sure, but web apps all the same. It’s mainly just a messenger app, after all.

So cool that you got to work with teams of devs that where able to do that.

Just because, as I assume from this quote, you weren’t able to work with teams like that, does not mean that there are no teams like that, or that Telegram doesn’t operate that way. Following modern practices, complex projects can be successfully done by relatively small teams. Yes, a lot of projects are not run that way, but that just means that it’s all the more a valid point of pride for Telegram.

I have never, in my decade as a software dev, seen a role dedicated to “making sure unit tests stay functional, meet standards and fixing them”. That is the developer’s job, and the job of the code review.

The tests must be up to standards and functional before the functionality they’re testing gets merged into main. Otherwise, yes, you may actually need hundreds of engineers just to keep your application somewhat functional.

Finally, 30 engineers can be a vast breadth of knowledge.

Even if you have a full-time role for continuously auditing the infrastructure (which I would say is the responsibility of either a security officer or a devops engineer), you still didn’t show how that needs a 15-person team, and an otherwise-untouched infrastructure should just keep on working (barring sabotage), unless someone really messed something up.

If CI builds or deployments keep randomly failing at your place, that’s not an inescapable reality, that’s just a symptom of bad software development practices.

This sounds like the devs are personally, sword and shield in hand, defending the application from attacks, instead of just writing software which adheres to modern security practices, listening to the Security Officer and occasionally doing an audit.

This comment smells of outdated software development practices.

If you have separate developers for writing unit tests, and not every developer writing them as they code, something is already very wrong in your project.

Deployment and infra should also mostly be setup and forget, by which I mean general devops, like setting up CI and infrastructure-as-code. Using modern practices, which lean towards continuous deployment, releasing a feature should just be a matter of toggling a feature flag. Any dev can do this.

Finally, if your developers are ‘code monkeys’, you’re not ready for a project of this scale.

There are good reasons to dislike Telegram, but having “just” 30 engineers is not one of them. Software development is not a chair factory, more people does not equal more or better quality work as much as 9 women won’t give birth to a baby in a month.

Edit:

Galperin told TechCrunch. “‘Thirty engineers’ means that there is no one to fight legal requests, there is no infrastructure for dealing with abuse and content moderation issues.”

I don’t think fighting legal requests and content moderation is an engineer’s job. However, the article can’t seem to get it straight whether it’s 30 engineers, or 30 staff overall. In the latter case, the context changes dramatically and I don’t have the knowledge to tell if 30 staff is enough to deal with legal issues. I would imagine that Telegram would need a small army of lawyers and content moderators for that. Again, not engineers, though.

Regarding mutation testing, you don’t write any “tests for your test”. Rather, a mutation testing tool automatically modifies (“mutates”) your production code to see if the modification will be caught by any of your tests.

That way you can see how well your tests are written and how well-tested parts of your application are in general. Its extremely useful.

On the one hand, mutation testing is an important concept that more people should know about and use.

On the other, I fail to see how AI is helpful here, as mutation testing is an issue completely solvable by algorithms.

The need to use external LLMs like OpenAI is also a big no from me.

I think I’ll stick to Pitest for my Java code.

As a dev, I think agile works best when there’s an ongoing conversation with the users, and I usually have to fight with management to get to speak to those actual users.

Why aren’t LRG releasing all these classics on GOG?

It’s no less possible than for the tooth fairy, or Santa Claus to exist.