What was dropbox written in

At the time, both the Dropbox server and desktop client software were written almost exclusively in Python. So in , Guido joined Dropbox. Since then, he has not only made contributions to Python at Dropbox, but also left an everlasting impact on our engineering culture and our people. It started with some of the young engineers Guido met early on. Clever code is usually short and cryptic, written by and for the individual who came up with it, but is hard for anyone else to understand—and nearly impossible to maintain.

So I led by example, and also by talking to other people. The team used continuous integration, which means every time a change to the code was submitted, a series of tests would run to make sure there were no problems with the new code. A lot of times the tests would fail, but half of those times, it was just a bad test. Two engineers in particular noticed how rarely the engineers would actually try to understand why the test was broken. As a way to improve the process, Guido joined their team to help fix all the broken tests or delete them if they couldn't be fixed and develop internal tools so that people who owned the tests could actually have an understanding of why they were broken.

Guido then switched teams and started working on mypy, now one of the most popular static type checkers for Python, written by a Dropboxer that he had helped hire during his first year here, Jukka Lehtosalo. Shortly after, Guido invited Jukka to visit Dropbox and interview for a job, which he took in Watch Now. Tech News You Can Use Newsletter We deliver the top business tech news stories about the companies, the people, and the products revolutionizing the planet.

Delivered Daily Sign up today. Editor's Picks. Linux kernel 5. Windows Do these 11 things immediately. Top 5 things to do about your tech before you die. If you're not using a kanban board, you're not as productive as you could be. Comment and share: How to write four million lines of Python: Lessons from Dropbox on using the programming language at scale.

Show Comments. Hide Comments. Dropbox has used Python since its launch, according to Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston's blog post announcing the company's hiring of van Rossum. Like Google, Dropbox uses Python heavily in building its online services.

Klint Finley is a contributing writer for WIRED covering tech policy, software development, cloud computing, and more. Contributor Twitter.

The company, however goes further than that required disclosure and has open-sourced some of its own internally developed software. There is one recurring theme in both the outside open source code it uses, and the code it has written for itself: Python. Many of those third-party open source libraries are written in Python, as are many of the projects hosted on its GitHub repository.

Python powers much of the Dropbox experience, both at the backend and at client. In fact, the Dropbox desktop client applications include a full install of the Python Version 2. A talk from PyCon by a Dropbox Engineer provides the answers: cross-platform support, readability, ease of learning. The quick development cycle Python makes possible was crucial to implementing, testing and deploying new features.