Wired’s piece on how WhatsApp serves 900 million users with only 50 engineers is getting a lot of attention.
It’s an incredibly impressive feat, but it’s a shame the article focuses on their use of Erlang rather than looking into what effect the tight focus of the product has.
The language is a factor, but it seems like the main reason they’d be able to work with a relatively small team is that they stick to a very small set of features?