Google Developers Blog

> ...mostly by Readergate...

Oh, come on... seriously? This argument is trotted out every single time Google shuts down something: "you are still upset about Google Reader". No: we are upset about all of those other things that get shut down, and people from Google shifting blame to Reader over and over and over again is nonsensical at this point: there are so many many examples of things being shut down, and Reader was probably the least interesting to those of us who care about this sort of thing :(.

Here is something I wrote four years ago when someone (as from Google!) tried to pull the "you are just upset about Google Reader" argument.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6518473

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They've shut down much more than Reader (seriously, who said anything about Reader? was that even a service a developer could rely on?). Even APIs they don't shut down, such as their OpenID login stack, they routinely replace (dropping a lot of the maintenance and support, which leads to weird failures) with "exciting new APIs" that have no migration path, such as with G+ Login (I am thankfully safe from this issue, as I did something crazy with Portable Contacts that have me Google user IDs that I started storing before we even knew what they meant; so, to be clear: I have very little personal axe to grind on this, but others should be wary).

They thankfully decided to just go commercial-ish with Translate, but the same can't be said about Charts (which had a long…

These are some of the top sites' engineering blogs which I collected over a period of time - I removed those which have already been posted:

Google: http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/ http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/ http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/

YouTube: http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/

Baidu: http://usa.baidu.com/category/baidutechblog/

Yahoo: http://yahooeng.tumblr.com/ http://yahoodevelopers.tumblr.com/

Wikipedia (closest I could find): https://blog.wikimedia.org/c/technology/

Amazon: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/

Twitter: https://engineering.twitter.com/

eBay: http://www.ebaytechblog.com/

Microsoft: http://microsoftengineering.com

FourSquare: http://engineering.foursquare.com/

Apple (closest): https://developer.apple.com/

Paypal: https://www.paypal-engineering.com/ https://devblog.paypal.com/

Dropbox: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/

Edit: More (collected from this link: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-top-startup-engineering-blogs):

Yelp: http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/

Quora: http://engineering.quora.com/

Yammer: http://eng.yammer.com/blog/

AirBnB: http://nerds.airbnb.com/

Square: https://corner.squareup.com/

Flickr: http://code.flickr.net/

Soundcloud: https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/

Cloudera: http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/

Slideshare: http://engineering.slideshare.net/

Heroku: http://engineering.heroku.com/

Pinterest: http://engineering.pinterest.com/

You're wrong on all counts.

First, the results aren't obvious (nor the underlying reasons). In fact Google published results a couple of years ago that got massive amounts of coverage suggesting the opposite (http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/05/spdy-performance-on-mobile-networks.html). I've worked on TCP optimization of mobile networks for the past 3 years, publicly criticized Google's study when it came out, and still the results of this paper are somewhat surprising to me.

Second, the underlying issue isn't the latency or the bandwidth of the cellular connection. It's the unpredictability. In fact, the Google study was using dodgy methodology where they assumed that a cellular connection could be modeled simply by bandwidth throttling + delay.

Third, it's absolutely not true that everyone has been thinking that replacing TCP is the solution, even if its problems in the cellular context have been acknowledged. If anything, the opposite, nobody has been thinking of it as a viable solution before QUIC. The deployment problems have just been too big -- but Google is in a unique position to fix that.

If you think that's funny, check out http://googledevelopers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/pubsubhubbub-feeds-and-feed-api.html :

we encourage providers of feed systems and related tools to connect their
automated systems for feed acquisition to our PuSH hub (or other hubs in the
PuSH ecosystem).

Google directly hosts many feed producers (e.g. Blogger is one of the largest
feed sources on the web) and is a feed consumer too (e.g. many webmasters use
feeds to tell our Search system about changes on their sites). Our PuSH hub
offers easy access to hundreds of millions of Google-hosted feeds, as well as
hundreds of millions of other feeds available via the PuSH ecosystem and
through active polling.

You'd think they could have picked a better subject to get people to trust them over, or a better day to post about it

> Due to the amount of CPU time required — 2 to 3 orders of magnitude more than zlib at maximum quality — Zopfli is best suited for applications where data is compressed once and sent over a network many times, for example, static content for the web.

So it's not a magic bullet, and only results in 3-8 percent shrink compared the zlib at maximum compression. It is interesting that it is able to be decompressed by existing algorithms, which means it can be rolled out immediately instead of waiting for it to be adopted by enough browsers to make the compression time investment useful.

Google's blog post is here: http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com.es/2013/02/compress-data-more-densely-with-zopfli.html