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Gergely Orosz

3 Feb, 10 tweets, 6 min read

Building well-performing (native) mobile apps: a thread.

As I'm writing the chapter on mobile performance in Building Mobile Apps at Scale, I'm doing a lot of reading on this topic.

A collection of the 9 most interesting iOS and Android app performance pieces.

@LinkedInEng

1. Building a blazing fast Android app from @LinkedInEng: engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2019/buil…

I love this overview: it seems so... simple. Try doing it and you realize it's far from it. Iterating *so* key for a performant mobile app.

Bonus: they use Nanoscope! (cc: @LelandTakamine )

2. Grab speeding up their "super app": engineering.grab.com/journey-to-a-f…

Pretty cool to see the top "lower hanging fruit" they saw: app startup, tile caching, animations, binary optimizations, and detecting performance regressions.

A years' work summarized in a short article.

@UberEng

3. Uber speeding up the mobile app... by ditching TCP by @UberEng . This is such a good summary of an unconventional approach and how the team arrived at this conclusion: eng.uber.com/employing-quic…

@NetflixEng

4. Netflix optimizing their mobile app on Android by @NetflixEng . They also came across TCP limitations over wireless. They approached it with e.g. batching and limiting the number of open connections.

This talk is full of advanced topics:

@NetflixEng

5. More from @NetflixEng - building smooth Android animations () and iOS animations ()

Netflix actually has a YouTube channel dedicated just for UI engineering: youtube.com/c/NetflixUIEng… Amazing!!

6. Facebook preventing mobile performance degradations via MobileLab by engineering.fb.com/2018/10/19/and…

This is just some really advanced stuff. It's also the direction where eventually any company needs to arrive, who take mobile performance seriously.

It's such a tough problem!

@SkyscannerEng

7. 3 simple ways to improve your app performance from @SkyscannerEng medium.com/@SkyscannerEng…

If you got overwhelmed by the previous ones, this is a lot more applicable for every developer. Small steps also help!

@LelandTakamine

8. Some open source tools that you might have (not) known about

Nanoscope built by @LelandTakamine , @attwellbrian & the @UberEng team: eng.uber.com/nanoscope/ The most accurate Android tracing tool.

Profilo by FB to understand app perf in the wild engineering.fb.com/2018/03/13/and…

9. All these tools will be listed in Building Mobile Apps at Scale, plus my take on mobile performance. The book is free, and in beta: mobileatscale.com . Grab it and send me feedback :)

Know any other good resources? Please add a comment!

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More from @GergelyOrosz

Gergely Orosz

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25 Jan

Writing is one of the best things you can invest in, as a software engineer. The more experienced people become, the more they tend to realize this.

Here's a thread on the 6 best writing resources I've found - both to "convince" you to write more and to help you "level up":

1. My extended thoughts on why writing is an undervalued software engineering skill, and the tools (Grammarly, Hemmingway) and books (Writing Well, Sense of Style) that helped me improve my writing.

Writing becomes *so* important at larger companies.

blog.pragmaticengineer.com/on-writing-wel…

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2. It's time to start writing by @alexnixon_uk . I like the story about making a technical decision, gathering around to talk.

What if they wrote instead? It would be more durable, scalable, and - with COVID - much more feasible.

alexnixon.github.io/2019/12/10/wri…

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23 Jan

How do you bring up the topic of promotions with your manager?

My 7 pieces of advice (thread)
1. Understand how proms work at your company.
2. Talk with your manager: get them on your side. If you don't bring it up: don't expect it to happen.

2. (Cont'd) It's in all managers' interest to have people promoted who are already performing at the next level. Makes the manager look good! You're on the same team.
3. Be realistic about what it takes to be promoted above the senior levels. These are usually far more difficult.

4. Set goals to "close the gap" that you have compared to the next level. Act like you would like if you had the title. Keep a work log.
5. Find a mentor within the company. Ask for regular feedback.

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Gergely Orosz

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17 Jan

A list of tech companies and their experimentation platforms. If you're an engineer and use (or want to use) experimentation / AB tests/feature flags, this is worth a read. A thread.

1. Uber. Lots of articles on Uber's engineering blog, from the platform itself (eng.uber.com/experimentatio…), through analyzing outcomes (eng.uber.com/analyzing-expe…) and a talk on decoupling experimentation logs from business metrics (conferences.oreilly.com/strata/strata-…)

2. Doordash. Reading most of this was "deja vu: this is *so* similar to what we are doing at Uber!" It's a good writeup : doordash.engineering/2020/09/09/exp…

Considering how fast Doordash went from <10% market share to market leader in the US, they definitely know how to experiment well.

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Gergely Orosz

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14 Jan

One of the challenges at Uber was building monitoring and alerting that worked reliably.

The problem was how Uber was (is) city-based and global alerting would not catch regional (city/country-level issues).

Two stories on why this is difficult:

1. A PayPal employee on a Japan business trip alerted us in 2016 that PayPal is not working there. He was right: it wasn’t working for 2+ months, across the country. How did we miss it?

There were 20 PayPal trip attempts/day only, and Japan was one of 60+ countries.

In the global scale, this accounted for a tiny fraction.

So we did what makes sense: added country-level alerting.

First, this became a data cardinality problem. 1,000 cities x 15 payment methods... not trivial to track all. We settled on countries & top cities.

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Gergely Orosz

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3 Jan

“Why does {company/app} have more than X engineers?” where X typically greater than 20/50/100.

Here’s how and why this makes sense for *the company* from a business-point of view. A thread.

1. What you see as “one app” is indeed, a lot of small parts that all contribute to the company making money.

Take the Twitter app. Almost all functionality (timeline, lists, profile, moments etc) are here to drive engagement. Then there’s ads and ad tools (I’m simplifying ofc)

2. A company never asks “how many engineers do we need overall?” They look at business cases.

“If we hire 4 engineers, we can build Lists. We expect to reduce churn by 4% annually which results in $15M/yr revenue. The cost of this team is A LOT less than this.”

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Gergely Orosz

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Thread on 7 things I now have more appreciation for, having experienced them first hand.

1. Marketing. "Build it and they will come" is not how products (or books) are bought. You need a marketing plan.

I put one together late: and delayed the launch to get some of the marketing ideas going. It was worth it, in the end.

@philip_kiely

2. Media exposure. My own "marketing network" was far smaller compared to exposure on a large publication (like HN). You can't really plan for or rely on this as marketing, but these are bigger waves than one can expect. @philip_kiely has a similar story.

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