[HN Gopher] Show HN: I wrote the book Building Mobile Apps at Scale
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Show HN: I wrote the book Building Mobile Apps at Scale
Author : gregdoesit
Score : 206 points
Date : 2021-05-05 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mobileatscale.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mobileatscale.com)
| bionhoward wrote:
| Typo in 3.20 - "Avoding"
| gregdoesit wrote:
| Hawk eyes - thank you! Fixed.
| mementomorti wrote:
| One more in the first section of the table of contents:
|
| "CI/CD & The Moible Build Train"
| gregdoesit wrote:
| This also slipped through. Thanks a lot, it's back to
| correct spelling!
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Great job. Weird question. Two of your book sponsors seem to
| compete. Bugsnag and Linear App. Have you used either of them?
| gregdoesit wrote:
| Thanks! Yes, I used both, and one of the founders of Linear App
| was a staff mobile engineer at Uber, where we worked together.
|
| Bugsnag is mobile crash reporting and Linear App project
| management (not specific to mobile, more like an alternative to
| JIRA). I see zero overlap between them.
| RPeres wrote:
| AFAIk they are not competitors. Linear is akin to Jira/Trello.
| Bugsnag is akin to Crashlytics.
| gregdoesit wrote:
| I'm excited to share that Building Mobile Apps at Scale: 39
| Engineering Challenges is out. It's my first-ever paperback book
| and one that is free as a PDF for the rest of the month[1].
|
| I had worked for years at Uber, first as a mobile engineer, then
| an engineering manager. Despite being a mobile-first company, I
| could not shake the feeling that non-mobile engineers and
| managers consistently underestimated the complexity of large-
| scale mobile development. I've been in so many meetings where an
| engineer, a PM, or a director would say, "oh, compared to the
| backend, the mobile part should be simple enough... it's just
| another frontend, right?".
|
| I found myself explaining again and again to PMs, engineers, and
| stakeholders all the hoops the mobile team needs to jump to ship
| things in production. How mistakes are very expensive - and thus,
| we need to ship almost all changes behind feature flags. How the
| build train means that the changes we make today will take at
| least 2 weeks to get to prod. How devices being offline is
| something we need to actively support, and anticipate... and so
| on. I noticed similar "aha moments" each time. Talking with other
| mobile engineers in similar environments, they were having
| similar conversations, and battling similar assumptions on mobile
| being relatively simple.
|
| I had been collecting the numerous challenging areas that I
| planned to publish as a blog post. After I shared the draft on
| Twitter[2], I got an unexpected amount of interest in people
| offering to contribute. The contents became too long for a post,
| and so this book was born. Several people asked for a paperback
| version[3], and I decided to create the book in print as well, as
| I felt the contents warranted it.
|
| I hope you find this book useful - both if you're a mobile
| engineer or if you work with mobile teams. And I'd love to hear
| any feedback!
|
| [1] https://www.mobileatscale.com/#pricing
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1335305213394251780
|
| [3] https://twitter.com/elevenetc/status/1335595203411972097
| swyx wrote:
| congrats on publishing! it was SUCH a good read and incredible
| quality. Absolutely recommend that everyone get it before the
| free period runs out, and then buy the full edition anyway
| because it is that good.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| "I've been in so many meetings where an engineer, a PM, or a
| director would say, "oh, compared to the backend, the mobile
| part should be simple enough... it's just another frontend,
| right?"."
|
| I've heard that before too. Even before getting in to the
| various engineering issues between different platforms, if
| you're talking about 'native apps' - things to go in to an app
| store - specifically apple... that "it's just another front
| end" line is beyond laughable.
|
| The effort involved in simply packaging up a handful of mobile
| apps for distribution in app stores - between multiple icons,
| splash screens, basic device testing... is often a level beyond
| what people who've not worked in mobile have ever had to deal
| with it - especially internal 'line of business' app folks.
|
| I say this as someone who's only done a small number of mobile
| apps (some angular/ionic years ago), and looking recently, it's
| only worse.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Thank you for the book, I really love your YouTube channel,
| very informative!
| fatnoah wrote:
| >I've been in so many meetings where an engineer, a PM, or a
| director would say, "oh, compared to the backend, the mobile
| part should be simple enough... it's just another frontend,
| right?".
|
| Oh my. As an Engineering leader, I've had this conversation
| many, many times.
| predaking wrote:
| "I've been in so many meetings where an engineer, a PM, or a
| director would say, "oh, compared to the backend, the mobile
| part should be simple enough... it's just another frontend,
| right?"."
|
| You sold me on the book with this sentence alone. =)
| smoochy wrote:
| I'm thinking mobile apps are a thing of the past. But writing a
| book is a hell of a job. I did it once, it was hard, as hell and
| the everybody pirated it.
| wdb wrote:
| As long you can't use push notification with Safari (iOS)
| mobile apps won't be of the past
| tracer4201 wrote:
| I'll share my perspective from working in big tech. Mobile apps
| aren't the sexy tech they once were (like in 2012). We do have
| mobile apps critical to the customer experience. Even the same
| app may have some components or features built natively, using
| some framework (React Native), or html rendering. And these
| apps are supported by dozens or more teams across
| organizations.
|
| Delivering this at scale is hard. And big tech likes to launch
| things quickly, and so you might see something that's an
| obvious thing to fix... but it turns out that changing that one
| thing will break several other things. There's no single
| holistic architecture even within one distribution of the app.
|
| It doesn't really matter if they're a thing of the past. Mobile
| apps aren't as novel anywhere - your customers expect a mobile
| app. That actually raises the stakes because making the wrong
| architectural decisions is going to be very costly in the
| future as your business has to scale or might even straight up
| prevent your business from becoming successful in the first
| place.
|
| Anyway - kudos to the author on publishing.
| mik3y wrote:
| Congratulations on publishing! And on a unique topic at that.
|
| I've built, and than managed teams building, apps of large scale
| and complexity. Your outline looks like a goldmine of practical
| and essential advice, especially for folks just ramping up on
| mobile. I'm excited to give it a read.
| Ologn wrote:
| > Bugsnag have published metrics on what median app stability
| scores look like:
|
| > 99.46% for apps built by 1-10 engineers
|
| > 99.60% for apps built by 11-50 engineers
|
| > 99.89% for apps built by 51-100 engineers
|
| > 99.79% for apps built by 100+ engineers
|
| I find it amusing that reliability goes up when the team hits 11
| engineers, then again when it hits 51 engineers, but then dips
| when it hits 100 engineers. Need to finally read my copy of the
| Mythical Man Month.
| gregdoesit wrote:
| This one was both surprising to me, but having worked on an app
| with >100 engineers, also less so.
|
| The challenge is how with 100 engineers you typically still
| want to ship 50-100x as much as with 1 engineer. And all those
| small features that the 1-3 mobile eng-sized teams work start
| to have unwanted/unexpected impact on each other, bringing down
| collective app stability.
|
| Also, the >100 Engineer apps are typically used globally, with
| often millions of users. Many of the crashes will come on
| Android, on exotic hardware / old OSes, in my experience.
|
| It is fascinating, regardless.
| dallamaneni wrote:
| Looks like a great book but was unable to download. Tried with
| more than one emails.
|
| Edit: Looks like they programmed it to work only with Gmail and
| probably other mainstream email providers.
| gregdoesit wrote:
| Ouch. Feel free to email me on this [1] email address and I'll
| help sort it out.
|
| Gumroad has fraud protection for free "purchases" as well and
| I'm also filtering out domains that are known to have high
| bounce rates or not valid domains.
|
| [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/connect/
| johnthescott wrote:
| still having issues. got a second email in gmail that appears
| to be a copy of the first email. the pain never ends.
| frfl wrote:
| Ran into same issue. What worked was the first email that gives
| you a link to gumroad. After using the coupon and providing an
| email to gumroad, it showed me the confirmation page, but
| didn't send me an email for the PDF. The fix was to go to that
| gumroad confirmation page, and where it says "enter a password"
| (basically it'll create a gumroad account) you'll then be able
| to login and check your gumroad account, book should be there.
| erre wrote:
| That sounds weird. I won't refute, because I used a Google
| Accounts email (albeit with my own domain). But what makes you
| say that?
| san_dimitri wrote:
| Typo: it should be 19. PART 3: LARGE TEAMS 13. Planning and
| Decision Making
| franzbusch wrote:
| Really great book and it captures the challenges perfectly!
| htkibar wrote:
| Having read the book cover to cover I can say that it is quite a
| well made, relatable list of challenges and how they are being
| resolved in the sector. Foreseeing these types of issues is hard
| especially if you never went through the process, and quite hairy
| to resolve as such I believe it is a very good resource to have.
|
| On another note each section comes with quite a lengthy follow up
| material, which I found absolutely amazing to use as a starting
| point as well.
|
| Absolutely love it!
| throwaway_dcnt wrote:
| Congratulation on the publication. I remember meeting you in
| Amsterdam Uber offices for a casual chat and coffee and really
| enjoyed our conversation. It was pretty neat that you were
| willing to nerd out with a rando from US over distributed systems
| and payments :)
| king_magic wrote:
| This looks like a great comprehensive dive into the topic.
| Congrats!
| wdb wrote:
| The book sounds really interesting! I hope it will discuss
| feature flags best practices and things like coordinators
| jakub_g wrote:
| Everything Gergely writes (and he writes a lot! Books, blogs,
| tweets; and also YT channel) is gold, especially if you're into
| mobile dev, interested in growing as a senior developer, or if
| you live in Europe and are interested by big tech. He's really
| filling a huge gap.
|
| Re:book, I've been an Android dev for 3 years (hybrid & native)
| and the book really covers the whole spectrum of things (as you
| can see in the table of contents) that need to be done to have a
| good app, some of them hard to know in advance. At the same time,
| it can (and should) be read and understood by non-devs (project
| managers, directors etc.). Congrats on the launch!
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(page generated 2021-05-05 23:00 UTC)