If you hire smart people, they'll be able to do that.In under a decade, technology has made a huge leap forward. "We expect the engineer to come in and spend their first week getting familiar with the language and learning to use the environment. We don't bring them in specifically because the engineer knows Erlang," Mahdavi said on Monday. "Our strategy around recruiting is to find the best and brightest engineers. And Mahdavi believes the relative scarcity of Erlang coders isn't a problem. Of course, WhatsApp didn't have to integrate with an existing infrastructure in this way. ![]() "You had this little island that was Erlang, and it was hard to build enough boats back to the island to make everything hook in," says Facebook vice president of engineering Jay Parikh. Facebook built its original Facebook Chat app in Erlang but eventually rebuilt so that it would better fit with the rest of its infrastructure. Relatively few coders know Erlang, and it doesn't necessarily dovetail with a lot of the code already built by today's internet companies. just the problems that needed to be solved." "It was an eye-opener to see the minimalistic approach to solving. "It was a completely different way of building a high-scale infrastructure," he said on Monday. Mahdavi joined WhatsApp about two years ago, after the startup was up and running, and its approach to engineering was unlike any he had seen-in part because it used Erlang and a computer operating system called FreeBSD, but also because it strove to keep its operation so simple. But Mahdavi says that the trick is as much about attitude as technology. Though not all that popular across the wider coding community, Erlang is particularly well suited to juggling communications from a huge number of users, and it lets engineers deploy new code on the fly. ![]() Part of the trick is that the company builds its service using a programming language called Erlang. WhatsApp doesn't talk much about its engineering work-or any other part of its operation, for that matter-but yesterday, at an event in San Jose, California, WhatsApp software engineer Jamshid Mahdavi took the stage to briefly discuss the company's rather unusual methods. ![]() But the 900 million-user milestone announced by Koun is very much a WhatsApp achievement, not a product of the formidable Facebook machine. Its primary social networking service is used by more than 1.5 billion people worldwide, and Facebook Messenger, an instant messaging service spun off from Facebook proper, spans 700 million. That means Facebook now runs three of the most popular apps on the internet. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, after Zuckerberg and company paid $19 billion for the startup a little more than a year ago. "Here's an action shot of you writing this update," Zuckerberg wrote. One said "congrats," and the other included a cheeky photo Zuckerberg had taken of Koum as the WhatsApp CEO keyed his 900-million-user post into a smartphone. And then Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promptly responded with two posts of his own. Earlier this month, in a post to his Facebook page, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced that his company's instant messaging service is now used by more than 900 million people.
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