Former Uber engineer shares “biggest engineering disaster” story

by scapbion 12/10/2020, 6:19 PMwith 2 comments

by temporallobeon 12/10/2020, 6:50 PM

Fascinating article, though a bit difficult to read due to some pretty obvious phrasing, grammar, and spelling mistakes (I get it, it’s more of an informal blog post than anything else). Anyway, I look at the situation and though I feel I might not have done things differently, sometimes there is simply no way to predict deeply-rooted, intrinsic architecture issues unless you already know the platform or tool you’re using. On the other hand, the article points out that the team was pretty unfamiliar with Swift (even though they had tried it before). Wasn’t the fact that Swift was previously “extremely problematic” a strong enough omen to make them second-guess their decisions to try it again? What’s that Russian phrase, “Fool me once...”?

by ohiovron 12/11/2020, 2:11 AM

Looks like hell. I wonder if they ever thought of trying making the app into a kind of dumb terminal to a computer with a little bit of guts.