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Showing posts with the label dev productivity

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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Lyft’s iOS Testing Revolution: How They Made Testing Less Awful (And Why It Worked) Let's be honest - iOS testing sucks. You write these giant test suites that take forever to run, then they break when someone changes a button color. Lyft's mobile team felt this pain BIG TIME - until they invented something called Focus Flows. Here's the messy story of how they fixed testing without making everyone hate their jobs. Not gonna lie - even their diagrams look better than most apps The Testing Nightmare Back in 2021 Lyft's iOS situation was rough: Test suites took 45+ minutes to run (coffee break anyone?) Flaky tests failed 30% of builds for no reason New devs needed 2 days just to understand the test setup One engineer joked: "Our tests tested our patience more than our code." Not ideal when you're trying to fix ride-sharing bugs at scale. The Breaking Point Three things forced change: 1. A critical payment bug slipped through test...
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