[carbonatedmilk]

I'm not saying it's a fair metric, but when I compare Twitter's open output to similarly VC-funded-but-now-public companies, the engineering output doesn't seem particularly exciting.

For comparison:

Meta / Facebook:

* React

* PyTorch

* Fasttext

* Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program

Google:

* Flutter

* Go

* Kubernetes

* Tensorflow

* BERT / Large language models generally

* Mapreduce / Hadoop

The much-maligned Uber:

* H3 Geospatial indexing

* Kepler.gl

* Manifold

Even AirBNB!

* Airflow

* Superset

I use most of these products (or their descendants) every day in my work. When I think of Twitter, all I think of is how they arbitrarily shut off humanitarian access to their APIs (and earlier, the Twitter firehose). There's not a single Twitter-supported open product that I use.

Am I the only one? Is there a great Twitter-supported project that I missed?

[doitLP]

Bootstrap!

It’s the only one I could think of but it certainly had a big impact on lots of people, enabling a lot of devs who were bad at design and responsiveness to make halfway decent looking websites.

[sciurus]

See https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1592774269733601281 for some of the examples of technical innovation at Twitter.

[maltalex]

How many of these innovations have been open sourced?

[_rs]

Bootstrap, though it has been a long time since I’ve used it (and I don’t know if they actively support it)

[disgruntledphd2]

> Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program

I'm pretty sure almost all of this team was laid off (certainly the people I knew who worked on it were).

> * Airflow

This is actually a clone of an internal FB tool (written by the same author after he left FB).

[carbonatedmilk]

> I'm pretty sure almost all of this team was laid off (certainly the people I knew who worked on it were).

That's really sad news. The crew I interacted with (Alex, Omari, Tobias, others) were top-flight engineers who also really understood the problem space and how to navigate the internal complexities of Meta. Hope the laid off / repositioned staff are OK, and if they're looking for new opportunities my email's in my profile.

[antirez]

Pellican (caching system), Bootstarp, their unique IDs system, a few more.

[Keyframe]

They could've supported bootstrap more than they did, right?

[jsiepkes]

Twitter developed Finagle, which led to Linkerd. Twitter did a whole bunch of pioneering of service mesh related technologies.

[matwood]

Years ago they did snowflake, a distributed ID generation library, that I used. They retired it long ago though.

[rilut]

+ Presto from Facebook