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We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare

217 points · 200 comments · geoffbp

btown · 1791059919 · focus · HN ↗
Sometimes I think back to Google Wave, that beautiful glimmer of real-time collaborative canvases, announced in 2009 when Angular and Backbone hadn't even been invented, and think it launched almost two decades too early.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
<a href="https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=3850" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=3850
<a href="https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa09/tech/slides/berlin.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa09/tech/slides/berli...
We're now in a world where we expect real-time interfaces to be developed and immediately deployed for our feedback by agents, in business-critical settings where classic SDLC timelines are far too slow, but code quality is becoming more difficult to manage at scale.
Git, at its core, is a fundamental notion that behavior is an auditable tree of immutable changes, where any participant can rearrange or rewind or remix this sequence on a local machine to show, and interact with, a provisional combination of those changes.
Google Wave, with its operational transformation (OT) and federation systems, was similar in many regards. We have CRDTs now, and far better techniques for auto-merging workstreams - including agentic systems that can resolve conflicts intelligently!
Wave fundamentally had a concept that people would come together and evolve a simple chat interface, into a customized real-time application for their use cases, and that that iteration could happen in real-time, with data and behavior both evolving in collaboration with bots. Wherever Git and the broader notion of SDLC goes, I hope it brings the best of this thinking.
1. lucideer · 1791063508 · focus · HN ↗
  The Wave release was the event that really kicked off my starting to rethink my own framing of what Google's engineering culture actually produces. I was so excited for its release, possibly moreso than any major innovation before then, & what was delivered was pure crap implementation wise. The idea was brilliant, & open, so theoretically someone could have done it well, but Google poisoned the well by releasing such a turd.
  Throughout it's existence Google has been revered as a company for its engineering output, but if you interrogate that even a little bit, you end up with a very small minority of gems among a massive ocean of over engineered crap. Even the huge objective open successes like k8s are to this day sold with the massive caveat of "it's heavy & over engineered, but": nobody's calling k8s elegant. Pretty much all of their good products are acquisitions, many of which they've subsequently degraded.
  One can certainly make this argument about almost any large corporation, but I do think there's very few with such a stark divide between how the quality of their engineering work is revered & the reality.
  1. switchbak · 1791063877 · focus · HN ↗
    Wave's failure and that of Google+ might have been the turning point for Google, never really to return to its former glory.
    reilly3000 · 1791065375 · focus · HN ↗
    Consider if they had focused on it instead of Android. Maybe we would still have Windows phones. Such are the tides of time. I think their present, malignant glory eclipses it financially but never will romantically.
    pjmlp · 1791116685 · focus · HN ↗
    Loss of Windows Phone is sadly Microsoft's own doing.
    They were around 10% in Europe when they ramped down everything.
    It was the option for those unable to buy iPhones, and not willing to use Android as alternative.
    However we had the whole mess with Windows 7 to 8.0 being a full reboot for devs, 8.0 to 8.1 being a reboot, 8.1 to 10 yet again, which naturally meant no one cared with quality apps as well.
    goalieca · 1791067602 · focus · HN ↗
    Wave was a cool tech demo, and I was excited to see it. The teaser video was solid marketing. Me and my lab mates couldn’t figure out what use case it solved though.
    Google+ was pure garbage being shoved down our throats. That was a huuuge signal that Google had changed.
    vrc · 1791068189 · focus · HN ↗
    They boldly claimed they'd beat Facebook in 100 days and began acquiring any startup that pretended to solve a social problem. Every team got a G+ OKR. In classic Google fashion, they chewed up the one social platform they had, Orkut, and gChat, which was filling the AIM void, also squandered its lead as it was subsumed. They never invested enough in their successful/functional video chat, and instead just had team after team launching new versions of the same damn thing. Looking through GCP and their AI/Vertex/Whatever naming soup, not much has changed.
    lucideer · 1791118390 · focus · HN ↗
    Wave was very simply modern email. Conceptually, there's nothing more to it. It was a new protocol that effectively filled the same basic needs as email, but left room for first class support for the types of features we've either hacked badly on top of email or still lack today - proper threading, traceable message amendment, rich messaging & multimedia support that's not a MIME hack & an improved security posture.
    I think that was maybe a secondary problem with Wave: it was marketed as some new voodoo that ended up smelling like a hammer seeking a nail, when it was really just Email 2.0
    drcongo · 1791128205 · focus · HN ↗
    I think this might actually be the first time I've understood that intention. Fully in agreement with your earlier comment that it was a total turd of a product - I remember a group of friends all getting access, playing with it for about 30 minutes, and then just coming away thinking what an awful experience it was, never to return. None of us were thinking of it as even vaguely email related, it basically felt like forums but worse. Or messaging but worse.

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