Top all-time · #3503
Figma
Company blog · blog.figma.comdesignprogramming
Figma is the company blog at blog.figma.com, writing about design and programming. Since 2017, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 47 times, most often “WebAssembly cut Figma’s load time by 3x”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Figma engineering posts on the C++-to-WebAssembly design tool, WebGL canvas, Rust in production, WebAssembly load times and rate limiting. Commenters cite them as examples of these techniques at work.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Welcome to Shortcut, Figma’s blog for telling stories about people, and the priorities, plans, and pivots they discover along the path of bringing new ideas to life.
Most-linked posts?
- WebAssembly cut Figma’s load time by 3x4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-06-08
- /building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web-6332ed4f1fcc3 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2017-10-02
- Rust in production at Figma3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-05-02
- Figma Platform2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-22
- Introducing BrowserView for Electron2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-06-29
- An alternative approach to rate limiting2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-12-19
- Desperately Seeking Squircles2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-04-03
What Hacker News says?
Figma (a UI design tool written in C++ compiled to JS using emscripten) talked about this briefly in their tech blog. They compiled FreeType to JS for rendering fonts to bitmaps: https://blog.figma.com/building-a-professional-design-tool-o...
Comment linking /building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web-6332ed4f1fcc
on “Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]”Submitted Rust in production at Figma as a story · 230 points
HN discussionSan Francisco; Full Time; Onsite I'm the cofounder of Figma ( https://www.figma.com ), a startup in San Francisco building a browser-based collaborative design tool to improve the way designers and developers work together. We're a small team (~35) and we're looking for talented engineers ( https://www.figma.com/careers ) who are interested in tackling hard technical problems with smart people and building a product…
Comment linking /building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web-6332ed4f1fcc
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2017)”Submitted Figma Platform as a story · 122 points
HN discussionSan Francisco; Full Time; Onsite I'm the cofounder of Figma ( https://www.figma.com ), a startup in San Francisco building a browser-based collaborative design tool to improve the way designers and developers work together. We're a small team (~35) and we're looking for talented engineers ( https://www.figma.com/careers ) who are interested in tackling hard technical problems with smart people and building a product…
Comment linking /building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web-6332ed4f1fcc
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2017)”Submitted What Tesla’s Model 3 UI Reveals About Its Vision for the Future as a story · 48 points
HN discussionSan Francisco; Full Time; Onsite I'm the cofounder of Figma ( https://www.figma.com ), a startup in San Francisco building a browser-based collaborative design tool to improve the way designers and developers work together. We're a small team (~50) and we're looking for talented engineers ( https://www.figma.com/careers ) who are interested in tackling hard technical problems with smart people and building a product…
Comment linking /building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web-6332ed4f1fcc
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2018)”Submitted WebAssembly cut Figma’s load time by 3x as a story · 22 points
HN discussionSan Francisco; Full Time; Onsite I'm the cofounder of Figma ( https://www.figma.com ), a startup in San Francisco building a browser-based collaborative design tool to improve the way designers and developers work together. We're a small team (~50) and we're looking for talented engineers ( https://www.figma.com/careers ) who are interested in tackling hard technical problems with smart people and building a product…
Comment linking /building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web-6332ed4f1fcc
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2018)”Submitted Figma 3.0 is herebye Invision as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSan Francisco; Full Time; Onsite I'm the cofounder of Figma ( https://www.figma.com ), a startup in San Francisco building a browser-based collaborative design tool to improve the way designers and developers work together. We're a small team (~40) and we're looking for talented engineers ( https://www.figma.com/careers ) who are interested in tackling hard technical problems with smart people and building a product…
Comment linking /building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web-6332ed4f1fcc
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2017)”Submitted Using Figma's Web API to Convert Designs Into React as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSan Francisco; Full Time; Onsite I'm the cofounder of Figma ( https://www.figma.com ), a startup in San Francisco building a browser-based collaborative design tool to improve the way designers and developers work together. We're a small team (~50) and we're looking for talented engineers ( https://www.figma.com/careers ) who are interested in tackling hard technical problems with smart people and building a product…
Comment linking /building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web-6332ed4f1fcc
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2018)”Submitted Desperately Seeking Squircles as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSan Francisco; Full Time; Onsite I'm the cofounder of Figma ( https://www.figma.com ), a startup in San Francisco building a browser-based collaborative design tool to improve the way designers and developers work together. We're a small team (~50) and we're looking for talented engineers ( https://www.figma.com/careers ) who are interested in tackling hard technical problems with smart people and building a product…
Comment linking /building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web-6332ed4f1fcc
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2018)”Submitted Introducing: Figma’s Platform as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSan Francisco; Full Time; Onsite I'm the cofounder of Figma ( https://www.figma.com ), a startup in San Francisco building a browser-based collaborative design tool to improve the way designers and developers work together. We're a team of ~60 and we're looking for talented engineers ( https://www.figma.com/careers ) who are interested in tackling hard technical problems with smart people and building a product that…
Comment linking /building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web-6332ed4f1fcc
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2018)”Submitted An alternative approach to rate limiting as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe canvas in Figma ( https://www.figma.com/ ) uses WebGL. We wrote about it here: https://blog.figma.com/building-a-professional-design-tool-o...
Comment linking /building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web-6332ed4f1fcc
on “WebGL2 Fundamentals”Submitted Figma Team Library 1.0 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOh! Actually, I'm paging through "Rust in production at Figma" ( https://blog.figma.com/rust-in-production-at-figma-e10a0ec31... ) and I think this is closer to what I would expect in a "paper" - while acknowledging that am predisposed toward thinking "graphs and data" when I think of a paper, I do think these kinds of blog posts have more of an impact (and seem more true to the idea of a "paper") on me than the cur…
Comment linking /rust-in-production-at-figma-e10a0ec31929
on “Rust in production at Figma”Submitted Figma 2.0: Now with Prototyping and Developer Handoff as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWas passing by and saw this, a better explanation and in-depth analysis can be found here: > https://blog.figma.com/an-alternative-approach-to-rate-limit...
Comment linking /an-alternative-approach-to-rate-limiting-f8a06cf7c94c
on “How to Design a Scalable Rate Limiting Algorithm”Submitted Introducing BrowserView for Electron as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSee figma.com Also https://blog.figma.com/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3... Browsers usually maintain a cache of compiled bytecode.
Comment linking /webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x-76f3f2395164
on “Hello WebAssembly”Submitted Figma Smart Selection as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFigma is using it (though I'm not sure how much money they're making at this point): https://blog.figma.com/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3...
Comment linking /webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x-76f3f2395164
on “Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly”Submitted Figma to Sketch Export Competition with $15K in Prizes as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFollowing a link in the article led me to this nice quote[0] "The trade-off is that positioning and layering BrowserViews is trickier because you can no longer use the normal HTML and CSS positioning and layering primitives like you can with a webview. You have to manually layout BrowserViews and make sure that it is layered properly." So to make electron less of a hog, you ditch the web part? [0] https://blog.figma…
Comment linking /introducing-browserview-for-electron-7b40b4b493d5
on “Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView”Submitted Desperately seeking squircles as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
