I was part of the team in Amsterdam on this. Insane days. Had some great engineers we hired in AMS. We were moving the whole source code into a monorepo as well which was another crazy project. I think if we had not had some of the engineers we did at those exact times, we would have not gotten out of it.
Problem here with Swift came down to
- Apple not dogfooding its own tech . Hell they did not even help us or other major companies like AirBnB and LihnkedIn (We formed a workforce on this problem with them which then forced the download limit to be upped by apple)
- Engineers deciding to adopt a language which they thought was great (and turned out not to be at the time) because they did not do the right analysis upfront for such a significant project. 'Wow look at this shiny new cool tool, lets use it' (Oversimpiification, swift was more pleasant to write with and you could be more productive which was no doubt a factor here)
Also, while management at the time didnt care for the remote offices much, I think the AMS team played a critical role in the success here. With the recent layoffs that occurred, I heard that they were fired.
Another fun story, we were trying to bring down our build times on our CI builds which were 1hr+ while battling macstadium and their crappy infrastructure with tens/hundreds of patches incoming each day.
Problem here with Swift came down to
- Apple not dogfooding its own tech . Hell they did not even help us or other major companies like AirBnB and LihnkedIn (We formed a workforce on this problem with them which then forced the download limit to be upped by apple)
- Engineers deciding to adopt a language which they thought was great (and turned out not to be at the time) because they did not do the right analysis upfront for such a significant project. 'Wow look at this shiny new cool tool, lets use it' (Oversimpiification, swift was more pleasant to write with and you could be more productive which was no doubt a factor here)
Also, while management at the time didnt care for the remote offices much, I think the AMS team played a critical role in the success here. With the recent layoffs that occurred, I heard that they were fired.
Another fun story, we were trying to bring down our build times on our CI builds which were 1hr+ while battling macstadium and their crappy infrastructure with tens/hundreds of patches incoming each day.