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Showing posts with the label Bazel

How WhatsApp Made Key Transparency Work (And Why It Matters)

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How WhatsApp's Key Transparency Changed the Game for Encrypted Messaging Okay so let's talk about something actually important for once - how WhatsApp made their encryption more trustworthy without making us jump through hoops. You know how every messaging app claims to be "secure" these days? Well WhatsApp actually put their money where their mouth is with this Key Transparency thing. Let me explain why this matters more than you might think. Visual from their tech docs - looks complicated but trust me it's cool The Big Problem Nobody Talks About So we all know WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption. Great. But here's the sketchy part nobody mentions - how do you REALLY know you're talking to who you think you are? Like, what if: Some hacker swapped the encryption keys without you knowing? There's a middleman reading your messages right now? The app itself got compromised somehow? Scary stuff right? That's where Key Trans...
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How Facebook Finally Fixed Their Messy iOS App (And Why It Mattered)

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Let’s be real - Facebook’s iOS app used to be a dumpster fire. Slow. Buggy. Crashed if you looked at it wrong. But here’s the wild part - they completely rebuilt the dang thing while BILLIONS of people were using it daily. No big deal right? Here’s the untold story of how they pulled it off without breaking everything. “Before” vs “After” - way less spaghetti code! The Hot Mess They Started With Back in like 2019, Facebook’s codebase was what devs nightmares are made of: 15+ years of legacy Objective-C piled up Build times longer than Avengers Endgame (seriously - 45+ mins) 500+ engineers stepping on each other’s code daily New features took weeks to implement cuz of dependencies One engineer told me: “It felt like changing tires on a moving Ferrari. While on fire.” The Breaking Point Three things forced them to act: App size ballooned to 400MB+ (users were deleting it) App Store rejection became weekly occurrence Top engineers were quitting cuz...
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Flexible Continuous Integration for iOS at Airbnb

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A sketch of Airbnb’s new iOS CI system. Imagine a bustling kitchen where chefs are preparing hundreds of dishes simultaneously. Now, imagine if every chef had to wait for a single oven to bake their dish. Chaos, right? This is the challenge Airbnb faced with its iOS development process, where a monolithic continuous integration (CI) system struggled to keep up with the growing complexity and scale of the codebase. Enter a flexible CI system , designed to handle the unique needs of Airbnb’s iOS team. In this blog post, we’ll explore how Airbnb reimagined its CI pipeline for iOS, enabling faster builds, better scalability, and improved developer productivity. Whether you’re an iOS developer, a DevOps engineer, or a tech enthusiast, this deep dive will provide valuable insights into building a modern CI system. The Problem with Monolithic CI Airbnb’s iOS codebase had grown significantly over the years, with hundreds of developers contributing to the app. The existing CI system, bu...
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