Thread

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. stackghost · 1791066510 · focus · HN ↗
    Most of the tech unicorns are like this. Zuckerberg caught lightning in a bottle one single time and everything they’ve tried since has sucked. Instagram was an acquisition. So were oculus and WhatsApp. By contrast their next in-house flagship was temu Wii avatars.
    Amazon hasn’t built anything innovative since the Kindle.
    Surely it’s a consequence of being publicly traded that these companies cease to be able to develop good novel products rather than acquire competitors or iterate on past successes.
    al_borland · 1791068505 · focus · HN ↗
    When you have nothing, risk is cheap. Once you make it, the strategy tends to shift from growth to protection.
    david38 · 1791091882 · focus · HN ↗
    You can’t be serious? AWS blows kindle out of the water in complexity and impact. Basic AWS started in 2006, Kindle in 2007.
    The number of products under the AWS that are more impactful to society and more profitable to Amazon is vast.
    ceejayoz · 1791115846 · focus · HN ↗
    The word used was "innovative", though.
    esafak · 1791131115 · focus · HN ↗
    Who offered IaaS and PaaS before AWS?? That is revolutionary.
    ceejayoz · 1791131316 · focus · HN ↗
    "Amazon hasn’t built anything innovative since the Kindle."
    That was in 2007; S3 and EC2 were in 2006. The pace of innovation at AWS has declined, which is partially to be expected as it matures.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Temple" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Temple probably counts, too. They had auto-provisioned VPSes long before EC2. I'd also count VMware ESX.
    riffraff · 1791118465 · focus · HN ↗
    Why would it be a consequence of being publicly traded? Apple has less concentrated ownership than Facebook or Google and has been far better at developing novel products.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.