[frays]

Yes.

I’ve been using Erlang since the early 2010s, right around the time we (the tech industry) discovered that WhatsApp was supporting over 400 million active users with only like 30 engineers.

I reached out to one of their engineers at the time (when I still lived in the US) who kindly responded to some of my questions via email. We ended up meeting for coffee and still stay in touch to this day.

I can tell you that Erlang is still very much a part of WhatsApp.

[ksec]

I don't think we ever got an actual figure but I often wonder how many of those 30 engineers were actually using Erlang, i expect most of them are iOS and Android engineers.

[toast0]

Ok so this [1] is the December 2013 blog with 400 million monthly actives and 50 employees.

I don't have access to anything anymore, but 30 engineers sounds about right.

At that time, I think was about Two on Nokia S40, two on S60, two on Blackberry, two on WP. I think three on Android, three on iOS. One or two on voip (shhh, it won't be out until summer 2014). I probably missed one or two people that floated around different client projects.

So, something like 17 on server?; we were not a 100% Erlang shop of course (our web page was just PHP, our blog was still Wordpress at that time (hiss), but I can only think of onen server person who wasn't doing much in Erlang.

There were also a lot of people wearing many hats. Several client team members had significant contributions to server work and some work the other way too.

Try as I might, I never did convince the S40 team to run Erjang though.

[1] https://blog.whatsapp.com/400-million-stories