Interesting write-up, though it leaves me terrified how a relatively small, more or less single purpose application like the Dropbox client has over 1 million lines of code in Python alone.
There is a reason why it is so much better than iCloud sync, Google Drive, Box or OneDrive.
Edit: I see the motherlode is in place earlier in the thread "Especially when you could build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-i...
(that post is old enough to vote in this year's election).
The fact that you think it's small means they're probably doing something right!
Relevant: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
(FWIW I don't use Dropbox myself, but I definitely had people ask me why Google needed 3,000 employees back in the day. Apparently it now has nearly 90K employees.)
>There's also a wide body of research that's found that decreasing latency has a roughly linear effect on revenue over a pretty wide range of latencies for some businesses. Increasing performance also has the benefit of reducing costs.
I wish he cited some of that research, because Google doesn't show much except for this amazon study with the 100ms.
I'm especially interested if there's any research on engineering tools and their latency (long build times) etc., which are chronically under addressed in quite a few large corporations. I'm just wondering if there's some studies that would make the case for me if I were to present this to management.
Given what you're replying to, I'd say irony sure does.
I think that in terms of lines if code, my contribution to many projects was net negative.
Watching files. Keeping backup of files. Keeping conflicts resolved. Watching Selective Sync files and folders. Watching Smart Sync files and folders. Notifications for synced files. Etc. etc.
There’s way more the client does than what I mention.