I am the COO of Salesforce. Two of the top ten jobs on Indeed are Salesforce Admin and Salesforce Developer, and the jobs are distributed around the world. We have a ton of stories of folks transitioning into the ecosystem and developing an extremely successful career.
Notably, our certifications are freely available at https://www.trailhead.com/. You can get started, learn, and get credentials for free. It is a great place to start, and we purposely made our learning and credentialing free so we could make it as easy as possible for folks pivoting mid-career into Salesforce.
I would be happy to point you in the right direction. My email is [email protected].
Everyone says that but I have not experienced it. In practice, I think this impacts backend extension developers more than people targeting LLVM IR. My experience covers version 7-11, but perhaps it used to be worse?
At FriendFeed, when we first introduced real-time comments and likes (pretty sure we were the first social network to do this), we did it with long-polling via an iFrame because web sockets did not exist. It actually worked pretty well!
People file lawsuits when companies have filed for IPO because generally that leads to companies being in a "quiet period" in which they cannot effectively respond publicly, which increases the likelihood of settlement, etc. It is also extremely common for competitors to seed the press with negative story lines, taking advantage of the legally mandated quiet period to remove the filing company's ability to counter these stories.
The APIs to build Live Apps enable real-time coediting and online / offline syncing with no special code; you get a ton for "free," and we are super proud of the technology.
Minifying alone is "kind of" important, and the benefits are hard to measure precisely with the combination of gzip, http/2, and the plethora of other network optimizations. However, the more sophisticated JavaScript compilers, like Google's Closure Compiler (https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/) also do a lot of other compiler optimizations, like inlining functions, eliminating dead code, etc.
When you are working on a large engineering team with lots of JavaScript volume written by a lot of different people, the dead code elimination alone is worth it; it means you can use one function from a library with millions of lines and your compiled JavaScript will only contain that individual function rather than many megabytes of unused code.
Our documents are broken into lots of smaller components we call sections. So, in a billeted lost, each list item is its own section.
Sections have a GUID and can be modified without touching any of the other parts of the document. This is useful in that it minimizes most common merge conflicts - they only happen of people edit the same sentence or spreadsheet cell while offline, but simultaneous edits of the same doc generally don't result in the need for any merge algorithm.
For offline edits of the same section, we use a fairly standard three way merge algorithm. Then, we show the edits we chose in the left hand side of the doc with the conversation along with a "Revert" button so you (the end user) can revert if our algorithm was wrong.
In general, if the subject includes "science" in the name, it probably isn't actually science. Political, data, social, etc. No chemist needs to say they study "chemical science."
2. Works offline. Whether spotty 3G connection or completely offline, our mobile apps work and sync whenever you come back online, even when multiple people are collaborating on the same document. The tech behind this is really cool. And everything is available offline automatically, not just stuff you "mark for offline"
It's always surreal to read Hacker News threads about the stuff you make. Harsh, but realistic. Anyway, I am Bret Taylor, co-founder of Quip. I am here if you have any questions, etc. (Also posted responses on the existing thread already).
Just to clarify a couple of points I have read:
1. We do support desktops. We have a really nice web app. It is Chrome/Firefox only right now.
2. We have an Android app. It is a "preview release" because it is not feature complete. We released it because it is pretty close, and you can download it at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quip.quip. It is early, but it exists.
We also support "high fidelity" copy and paste, i.e., if you paste a doc from Quip into Word or similar products, it preserves all the formatting correctly. Not awesome and we will improve in subsequent updates, but it actually does most of what you'd need in the meantime.
We support external keyboards and keyboard covers for tablets, both of which are a big step up over screen keyboards. Works really well - I actually have grown to really love it.