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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. al_borland · 1791068213 · focus · HN ↗
    I think releasing Wave as its own product, via private beta, was a mistake. If they wanted to reinvent email, they should have done it with Gmail, similar to what Apple did with iMessage.
    Gmail could operate as it always has, being an email client that integrates with every other email client. But when a Gmail user emails another Gmail user (or a group of them), have the thread automatically turn into a Wave, with everything that entails. This gets the new features where people already are, creates an incentive for people to move their email to Gmail, and doesn’t create yet another inbox for a person to manage.
    I always saw Wave as a business failure, not an engineering one, for this reason.
    eszed · 1791173144 · focus · HN ↗
    Huge mistake! I loved Wave, and used it very successfully on one creative project. When I tried again, with some of the same people, we'd collectively burned all of our invite tokens and couldn't get any more, so we had to revert to emailing things back and forth so the new folks weren't kept out of the loop. That killed it, as far as any of us were concerned. I think I used it one more time, to plan a party or something with my sister, and never again. Integrating it into Gmail, as you suggest, would have been a better path, but hardly necessary. It was great as a stand-alone product, but destroyed itself because the damn invite system stopped the network effect cold.

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