Find Out How 900 Million Worldwide WhatsApp Users Managed By A Team Of Only 50 Engineers
WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum recently announced on his Facebook page that his company’s instant messaging service is currently used by more than 900 million users worldwide. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg quickly reacted with two posts, of which one said “congratulations,” and the other said “Here’s an activity shot of you composing this upgrade,” which referred to a picture of Koum keying his 900-million-client post into a cell phone.
Facebook is the owner of WhatsApp, as Zuckerberg and company had paid $19 billion to take over the startup more than a year back, suggesting that they now run three of the most predominant web applications. Facebook is used by more than 1.5 billion individuals across the globe, while Facebook’s Messenger, an instant messaging service spans 700 million. In such a scenario, the 900 million-user milestone is a huge achievement for WhatsApp, as it not a product of the powerful Facebook.
One of the interesting fact is that WhatApp achieved this milestone with just a small team. At the time of acquisition by Facebook, it had a group of 35 designers and more than 450 clients. Due to the rise in the quantity of WhatApp clients, the designing staff currently consists of 50 architects that runs things naturally.
Jamshid Mahdavi, WhatsApp programming specialist at an occasion in San Jose, California told Wired that the organization utilizes a programming language called Erlang that manufactures its administration. Erlang may not be too predominant like the more extensive coding group, however, it is very suitable for designers to convey new code on fly and to balance exchanges from extremely large number of clients.
Although Erlang’s roots are in telecommunications, it’s unique features like concurrency and extensive library make it suitable as a general-purpose programming language and well-suited to programming projects such as network servers, control systems and web development. WhatsApp is part of a larger push towards programming languages using Erlang that are designed for concurrency, where many processes run at the same time.
Erlang lets coders work at high speed, which is another important part of modern software development. It offers a way of deploying new code to an application even as the application continues to run, which makes it more useful in an age of constant change. However, on the flipside, there are only few coders who know Erlang, and it doesn’t necessarily fit with a lot of the code that are already built by internet companies these days.
