[kinlan]

Hey all, I lead the team that runs this site.

We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds.

I'm painfully aware that this isn't the best solution right now. I needed our team to hit a deadline for migrating all the content to the new system, and then manage cleanup of known missing functionality after.

We are working on making sure this lands asap.

Paul

[lapcat]

> We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds.

I had been wondering why https://developer.chrome.com/feeds suddenly died.

> I needed our team to hit a deadline

Why?

[pc86]

Probably related to whatever reason the site was moved in the first place, but regardless an internal Google deadline is unlikely to be met with anything other than "so what, fix RSS first" in this thread.

The majority of corporate deadlines are fictional in the sense that there is not a regulatory or legislative component to them, so it's easy to hand-wave them away and say that $THING should be a higher priority than the deadline. But that doesn't make them any less real for the people who have that deadline imposed by their boss (or more realistically, their boss's boss's boss's boss).

[Ajedi32]

"so what, fix RSS first" seems like a valid criticism even if it really is true that this isn't something this particular person has any control over. If your organizational structure is forcing you to do something dumb, then there's a problem with your organizational structure.

[Sebb767]

Which might be true, but even harder to fix than the feature in question.

[pc86]

Maybe - I don't think letting engineers decide all prioritization is by definition any better than having it all decided by SVPs trying to get their EVP promo or next stock bonus - but "fix Google's organizational structure" is about as helpful/useful a comment as "so what, fix RSS first."

[kinlan]

There's lots of reasons some of which I can't go into details about, but there are some that I can:

There is a freeze to the new infrastructure's product features until after the new year and we needed to get this in before then (we can land feed support without a product feature change)

The people I have working on the older infrastructure will be on new projects for our team in the new year.

[lapcat]

Were the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling imposed on you from above, or were they your decisions?

In a blog post two months ago you said, "I've taken the decision..." https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration

There was clearly someone in Google management who decided that RSS could be broken.

Why is this important? Well, for example, it seems that the RSS feed was already broken when this important announcement was posted: "Resuming the transition to Manifest V3" https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to...

[kinlan]

> Were the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling imposed on you from above, or were they your decisions?

They were my decisions based on all the data I had, including launching with what we had.

re: "Resuming the transition to Manifest V3" this was posted on the old infrastructure and should have been in your RSS feeds up until late last week when our migration happened - so for just under a month... I can check more to make sure what I am saying is correct, but the migration only happened last week.

[lapcat]

According to my backups, https://developer.chrome.com/feeds had XML with <updated>2023-10-17T00:00:00Z</updated> until December 7, then HTML after December 8. So it wasn't entirely broken until December 8 but seems to have been frozen for some time before that.

[kinlan]

Hmm - that shouldn't have been the case, but I can speak to the team to see what might have happened. Thanks for diving in to this.

[listmaking]

Not the GP but I think that blog post https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration you linked explains it pretty clearly?

• The people working on web.dev decided to migrate to a common Google site platform, so that they could focus on content rather than maintaining an ad-hoc infrastructure,

• That platform happens not to support RSS (yet), so they've done the best they can in the meantime, filing a bug with the platform, creating the https://developer.chrome.com/feeds info page acknowledging the issue, and even creating unofficial feeds.

You could phrase this as “someone in Google management who decided that RSS could be broken”, but relative to the big decision of whether to spend effort maintaining your own custom infrastructure or just focus on the content, the presence or absence of RSS support is probably just not a big factor.

[One could imagine a culture of "never migrate to a new system unless it fully supports every single functionality of the old system", but that (just like "never launch a product/feature unless you're confident you're going to support it forever") is simply not in Google's culture, where there are always ongoing migrations between "the old system that is deprecated and the new system that is not ready yet" — but that is "just" a cultural problem rather than anyone consciously deciding that RSS could be broken.]

[lapcat]

> relative to the big decision of whether to spend effort maintaining your own custom infrastructure or just focus on the content, the presence or absence of RSS support is probably just not a big factor.

This is a false dichotomy. I wasn't questioning the decision to migrate platforms, I was questioning "the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling".

> there are always ongoing migrations between "the old system that is deprecated and the new system that is not ready yet" — but that is "just" a cultural problem rather than anyone consciously deciding that RSS could be broken.

I disagree, because whenever you migrate, some features are considered essential and others inessential. Someone consciously decided that RSS was among the inessential features in this specific case. The "culture" did not make that specific decision.

This is the developer relations team. How can you have relations with developers when they don't even see your announcements? The essential part is the communication with outside developers, not the internal CMS.

> they've done the best they can in the meantime, filing a bug with the platform, creating the https://developer.chrome.com/feeds info page acknowledging the issue, and even creating unofficial feeds.

How were developers supposed to know any of this? I had no idea until now.

[listmaking]

The freeze "until after the new year" is just the end-of-year freeze to avoid production breakage when a lot of people are on vacation: it's an extension of the principle of not deploying on Friday evenings / weekends; lots of companies have such a freeze. Once you've decided a couple of months earlier to do a migration, doing it "before the freeze" is also a natural deadline to pick, for migrating to the new infrastructure, and for people working on the old infrastructure to complete the migration and move to other projects. I'm not on the team but these all seem like logical choices.

And yes, in the decision between "keep maintaining a custom infrastructure" and "switch to a common infrastructure", someone must have decided that RSS support is not an essential feature whose lack should block (or indefinitely postpone) the migration; this seems reasonable and what my previous post was about, including the "probably just not a big factor" bit you quoted above. It looks like they're planning to add this support though.

[dagurp]

There was a bug in the old RSS implementation (the last-updated date was always Jan 1st 1980) so it would be great if you fixed that when you re-add it

[gred]

My first quick scan of your comment gave me the impression that you were sarcastically asking for the date bug to be replicated in the new system for "backwards compatibility" purposes. Glad to see, upon reviewing, that I was wrong :-)

[djbusby]

Gotta hit those marks you've made up so you can get a bonus.

[happytoexplain]

For what it's worth, when the answers are "we are working on a solution" and "we are working on making sure this lands", to me, that is classical business speak for "we are not going to add it, but will present an alternative (that probably doesn't meet your needs the way it did)."

I'm leaning toward giving the benefit of the doubt in this case, but why be oblique like this? Why not say "We are working on adding RSS" or "we are aiming to restore RSS support"?

[kinlan]

Sorry - it was business speak, it's certainly words that we use internally, the intent was to say we are working on adding RSS back to the site.

[Sebb767]

All of these statements seem quite similar to me. Especially "we are aiming to restore RSS support" is even less committal. To me, Pauls post reads like a pretty direct promise to restore that functionality and not like business speak.

[davzie]

All the responses here just highlight how unreasonable technologists can be. Business and work is about trade-offs and so many on hacker news seem to be absolutists. Congrats on hitting your deadline and putting yourself out there; these are the sorts of decisions that I wish more hackers would have to actually make to realise the reality of the world.

[hliyan]

Nice touch in the HN bio!

> RSS is alive https://paul.kinlan.me/index.xml

[kinlan]

Heh. Very apropos (it's been in there for a while).

[rabbits_2002]

Any somewhat competent programmer can create a working RSS feed in an hour. What the hell is happening at Google?

[iamgopal]

Can you elaborate on why it’s difficult to add ? I mean it is not looking like technological problem,