PayPal's engineering team writes about its use of Node.js, Python, React, and accessibility tooling.
HN commenters cite it for PayPal's move to Node.js and its "10 myths of enterprise Python" post, plus the Bootstrap accessibility plugin.
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/
The documentation also has an aura of "Isn't this all very clever?"
This attitude needs to die. Forever. Why the fuck should I need know about contravariance and parser combinators to write a basic web app? I hope this Scala forking will kill it in Typesafe. It has no place in actually building products.
I notice a lot of difference in quality between libraries released by enterprises and those by users. It's the difference between https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2014/02/13/hello-newman-a-rest-client-for-scala/ and Dispatch. We need way more of the former.
Mainly the boilerplate other languages force upon you.
Whenever i look at Java Code i start to chuckle.
Its so much more information that you need to load into your head.
To quote a picture from the post:
https://www.paypal-engineering.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/cpp_py_medium.png
And its not like you need static typing everywhere just in some places its better to enforce it for your own sanity. Type hinting looks like a good way to solve this problem in python.
Paypal developed the Node and Java code in parallel.
"Our first adopter of node.js in production wasn’t a minor application; it was our account overview page and one of the most trafficked apps on the website. We decided to go big, but we also mitigated that risk by building the equivalent Java application in parallel." -- https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2013/11/22/node-js-at-paypal/
So, in this case Node wasn't being compared to a legacy system.
PayPal is a good example of a company that moved from Java to Node.js where the server listens to the client then have it slowly replace code going forward on the back end. [0]
There is a discussion that the bigger issue was getting management to allow them to rebuild all the code and by using Node over Java provided a mechanism to do this. This is touched on in the article.
[0] https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2013/11/22/node-js-at-paypal/
>* Learn to use a screenreader and just play with your app/website.
Excellent advice. I'll start testing my sites with a screenreader in addition to IE8 and all other other usual suspects. I also just found a cool toolkit for Bootstrap 3 (I use Bootstrap a lot):
https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2014/01/28/bootstrap-accessibility-plugin-making-the-popular-web-development-framework-better/