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Comment by power78 | Hacker News Reader

It is strange. They were trying to decrease update sizes by using File-by-File patching, for example, but never decided to use the best applicable compression library until an intern came along?

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According to the article Brotli compression was only launched in 2015 and she did the integration work in the summer of 2016. Bearing in mind we don't know how much of an improvement to Brotli was made during the intervening period and what the evaluation and adoption criteria were that actually seems pretty prompt.

This, and I'd see it as probably something that was on the Play team's roadmap that they decided was a project that would be a good fit for a summer intern, and they may have deferred the work by a few months on that basis.

Speaking from my own experience trying to put together good intern projects, it's actually pretty tough to find that magic combination of something that will occupy an entry-level programmer for a summer, and give them a sense of accomplishment, and actually be useful to the team in the long term. In the past I've deferred useful work so that it could be given to an intern.

As someone who has managed interns, this is exactly my take. It's easy to have wishlist items that you never get to. Things like this are ideal in that they are not time-sensitive, don't require a lot of additional knowledge to do proof-of-concept work on, are accessible to undergrads, and you can be pretty confident in the implementation if it passes unit tests.

She gets much of the recognition, and the blog states she made the evaluation (followed by a simple comparison table) and then implemented changes to the servers while a small, subtle shout out goes out to the authors of the compression algorithm. It's as if the credit was passed on to her for the purpose of google internship advertising.

I think outside of this article, it's very different who gets recognition here.

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