I'm a little scared to admit this but I actually enjoyed this blog post in its LLM form. The writing style and tone was strange but I liked being led through a story and all the little explanations of why developers are the best folks to target for these scammers.
Shopify successfully migrated two of our largest apps, Shopify Mobile and Shopify Point of Sale (POS) to React Native's New Architecture while maintaining weekly releases and serving millions of merchants. This migration involved a complex codebase with hundreds of screens and native modules, extensive custom components, and deep integration with first-party libraries like FlashList.
Hey HN! I'm Regina, technical comms from Shopify. wave
I am so, so thrilled to see this piece published as the first story in Applied Intelligence, the new publication by First Round. Their team spent countless hours learning and chatting with our Engineering team, and it's the first time we're publicly talking about some of the projects mentioned in the article.
Pop in your questions here — if I can't answer them, I can try to pull in someone who can!
I never found gmail particularly convenient. I still have a google account with an @gmail.com address, because Android basically doesn't work without that (you can make a personal @whatever else address, but that doesn't work with Android; you can also make a workspace @whatever else address, but that requires payment or time travel, and doesn't address the core issue).
The only inconvenient thing is people know how to spell gmail.com and have to be told how to spell my personal domain, but my preference is to use my personal domain anyway, I've been using my personal domain for email since before gmail launched; if I used gmail, I'd be forwarding my mail to it, rather than using my gmail address. Fastmail for mail just works, and I don't remember if I had to turn conversations off, but I only had to turn it off once (I detest the conversations feature, but if you like it, I can't tell you if Fastmail has a good one or not :P). Actually, the second inconvenient thing is the Android app doesn't really do offline content; I think gmail is better at that; I griped about this for a long time, but now I just accept it --- offline content is a good match for email, but it doesn't bother me enough to do anything about it.
I do use my gmail address for something things where I feel it's a good thing to "present as a normal person", or where my email domain might be embarrassing (I have some other email domains, but one of them is a .is, which is even worse for getting people to spell). I used to use my yahoo address for that, but I got tired of logging into yahoo just for that, and google has successfully tied me into their account system.
I do not use the Fastmail calendar. Android calendar is convenient, and tied to google calendaring.
No, the only difference I noticed was that it was faster. I still use Maps and have my Google account, but I don't use Gmail (or Google calendar). I made the transition years ago and it was really painless for me.
Transitioning from Gmail was painless? What approach did you take? I think I would have hundreds, if not thousands of services I would need to change email on.
I did it little by little, no need to rush it. Just start changing some main ones and as you log in to the others take the min it takes to change it.
On top of that I moved services to their own custom email like <service-name>@<my-domain>.com. That way it's all neatly sorted inside Fastmail in different folders (and I know who is selling my data)
My approach has been simply signing up for new services on my non-Gmail addresses, and occasionally switching important ones over. Nobody's making you delete your Gmail account, so you can still keep it open for legacy stuff as long as you need to (especially since it's free).
Not parent, but: The primary inconvenience I see with de-googling is just the sheer number of things that become just slightly harder. For one, Login with Google. Now, I know people de-googling will probably want to have separate accounts rather than SSO anyways, but it is an important consideration. You also lose GDrive and the GSuite in general, which alternatives exist, yes, but IMO not as good. Also, most people who work online on GDocs will now find it inconvenient to collaborate with you.
All great points. I try to de-google mostly from a personal perspective (though still haven't gotten off Maps or Android). I use loads of Google products at work though because I'm not the decision maker there.
I do use personal Google Workspace now--in part, because I used to use it extensively at work. But even if I used something else, people casually share GDocs with me from time to time.
