Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48192131

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

I'm relying purely on memory, but all of the reasons were super public at the time. The internal Java editor tooling team decided that they weren't investing any more time into Intellij. And then a few months later, the Android team relaunched Android Studio using Intellij with full internal support. The existing Java tooling squad put up some amount of fuss saying that they had already made the decision, and the Android team gave a long and diplomatic response that could be compressed down into, "we don't report to you and we don't care what you think." This coincided with the entirety of Google becoming mobile native, so the mobile team were given free rein to call the shots.

> IMO IntelliJ never worked very well in google3

YMMV, we had some people in Docs/Drive who invested a lot of time into making Intellij usable for everyone, and following their system, it worked way better for us than Eclipse did. All of the "Let me sing you the song of my people ::UI freezes::" memes were very true in my experience.

Here's how a big tech reporting chain sees this situation when everything is smooth sailing: "We're growing 3x year-over-year? After 2 years, the cost will be an order of magnitude higher no matter what solution we pick. The constant factor doesn't matter that much. But we have such an incredible roadmap that we will book more than an order of magnitude of revenue, backed by this new ledger project. The cost will always be a nonissue because of growth."

And then 2 years go by, and this incredible product growth adds a bunch of ledger entries that weren't there 2 years ago, someone nudges your reporting chain with the question, "this is pretty expensive.. what gives?" and then someone with a good combination of social and technical skills points out that a migration to your existing storage solution would be a cost effective way to continue growing.

At every step of the way, everyone is generally happy with what's going on.

Random observations from my first one: - presenting my idea visually helped crystallize my thinking in a way that writing doesn’t. And writing was already very good at crystallizing my thinking. - even making a bad video was a lot of work - making a video presentable is a deep subject. Subtle changes were throwing off my setup. Now I understand why so many influencers are fitness and lifestyle; the demand side is obvious, but when you’re already camera-ready you have a huge advantage on the supply side - described something I built felt natural. I do that for a living. The intro was like 45 seconds and took me like 45 minutes to film because it was acting and I don’t know how to do that - learning about video editing features had an immediate payoff because video is so long

[0] I’m posting the videos at https://m.youtube.com/@bitlog-dev . I said if the first one got to 100 I’d commit to making at least 10, and I just crossed that threshold

Programs didn’t auto save and regularly crashed. It was extremely common to hear someone talk about losing hours of work. Computers regularly blue screened at random. Device drivers weren’t isolated from the kernel so you could easily buy a dongle or something that single-handedly destabilized your system. Viruses regularly brought the white-collar economy to its knees. Computer games that were just starting to come online and be collaborative didn’t do any validation of what the client sent it (this is true sometimes now, but it was the rule back then).

From the starting population of overweight people, only 3% of people dropped down to, and stayed, a healthy weight.

I’ve gotten some success iterating on the one-shot prompt until it’s less work to productionize the newest artifact than to start over, and it does have some learning benefits to iterate like this. I’m not sure if it’s any faster than just focusing on the problem directly though.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47203985

Points: 2

# Comments: 2