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Showing posts with the label technical debt

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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DoorDash's iOS Performance Breakthrough: A Case Study in App Optimization

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Let me tell you about the time our iOS app got so slow that users could literally say "I'm hungry" three times while waiting for it to load. Not cool for a food delivery app. Here's the messy, real-world story of how Doordash fixed similar Issue. Our "before" and "after" metrics - that downward slope never looked so beautiful The Wake-Up Call It started when their analytics showed: 4.2 second average cold start time (yikes!) 1 in 3 users tapping repeatedly like that would help App Store reviews saying "slow as molasses in January" Turns out when people want food, they want it NOW. Who knew? What Was Making them Slow After digging in with Instruments (and several nervous breakdowns), they found: SDK Overload: 18 - yes EIGHTEEN - analytics packages loading at launch Storyboard Spaghetti: UI files so big they made Xcode cry Eager Beaver Network Calls: Fetching data we didn't need yet Font Fiasco: ...

How LinkedIn Finally Fixed Their Messaging Mess (And Why It Took So Damn Long)

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Let’s be real - LinkedIn messaging used to suck. You’d get notifications that didn’t make sense. Messages showing up in weird places. That awkward moment when someone replies to a message you can’t even find. But after 2 years of work, the eng team finally cleaned up this hot mess. Here’s the inside story you won’t find in their press releases. Old vs New - spot the difference! The Hot Mess Era Back in 2020, LinkedIn’s messaging was held together with duct tape: 3 different codebases for messages (why??) Notifications that sometimes... just didn’t notify Group chats that exploded if someone left Search? Forget about it One engineer told me: “We had so many message types even we didn’t know how they worked.” Yikes. The Breaking Point Three things forced them to act: 1. Users complained about lost job offers (!!!) 2. Mobile app ratings tanked to 3.2 stars 3. New features took 6+ months to ship Something had to give. The Great Unification Project The ...

How eBay Made Their Site Faster (One Tiny Cut at a Time)

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How eBay Made Their Site Faster (One Tiny Cut at a Time) You know how most tech companies brag about their big, flashy performance improvements? Well eBay took the complete opposite approach. Instead of making one huge change, they made literally thousands of tiny optimizations. And guess what? It worked way better than anyone expected. Not the most exciting graph, but those small dips add up! The "Death by 1000 Papercuts" Problem Back in 2021, eBay's engineering team noticed something frustrating - their site was getting slower, but there wasn't one obvious culprit. It was more like: A few extra milliseconds here Some bloated JavaScript there Unoptimized images everywhere Individually, none of these were dealbreakers. But combined? The site felt sluggish compared to competitors. And in ecommerce, speed literally equals money. The Wake-Up Call The numbers didn't lie: Metric Impact 100ms delay 1% drop...

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