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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. [deleted] · 1791074289 · focus · HN ↗
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