Top all-time · #263
Dropbox Tech Blog
Company blog · dropbox.techsystemsdata
Dropbox Tech Blog is the company blog at dropbox.tech, writing about systems and data. Since 2020, 188 different Hacker News readers have linked it 289 times, most often “Rewriting the heart of our sync engine”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dropbox's tech blog for infrastructure write-ups, especially the Rust rewrite of its sync engine, plus pieces on web server tuning, compression and the Magic Pocket storage system.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Rewriting the heart of our sync engine19 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2020-03-16
- Our journey from a Python monolith to a managed platform9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2021-03-04
- After four years of SMR storage, here's what we love–and what comes next (2023)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-03-08
- Lepton Image Compression7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-04-09
- Testing Sync at Dropbox6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-04-20
- /infrastructure/lossless-compression-with-brotli5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-10-26
- Dropbox Tech Blog: Prompt Injection via Control Characters5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-07-19
- Inside the Magic Pocket (2016)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-12-02
- Boosting upload speed and improving Windows' TCP stack5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-04-27
- Dropbox: Our journey to type checking 4M lines of Python5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-05-04
What Hacker News says?
Sure! I mentioned a few orthogonal concepts that go well together, and each of the following examples has a different combination that they employ: - the company that developed Madsim (RisingWave) [0] [1] is tries hardest to eliminate non-determinism with the broadest scope (stubbing out syscalls, etc.) - sled [2] itself has an interesting combo of deterministic tests combined with quickcheck+failpoints test case au…
Comment linking /infrastructure/-testing-our-new-sync-engine
on “Is something bugging you?”Submitted Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy as a story · 427 points
HN discussionI’ve found my biggest differentiator over the last decade was soft skills - writing, dealing with stakeholders, knowing how to talk to normies, being comfortable in the room with decision makers, being able to do effective presentations and project management skills. And knowing how to “deal with ambiguity” and focus on how to add business value. If you look at the leveling guidelines of any tech company, anything a…
Comment linking /culture/sharing-our-engineering-career-framework-with-the-world
on “Googler... ex-Googler”Submitted The Great CoffeeScript to Typescript Migration of 2017 as a story · 307 points
HN discussionThere was a similar article from Dropbox years ago: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/optimizing-web-servers-f... still very relevant
Comment linking /infrastructure/optimizing-web-servers-for-high-throughput-and-low-latency
on “Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning”Submitted Boosting upload speed and improving Windows' TCP stack as a story · 261 points
HN discussionYou're probably backwards there. Edit: in 2016 Dropbox stored 400PB ( https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/magic-pocket-infrastruct... ), in 2018 S3 was storing multiple exabytes ( https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Amazon-S3-across-all-region... ) I suspect multiple exabytes is a low ball.
Comment linking /infrastructure/magic-pocket-infrastructure
on “Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack”Submitted We unplugged a data center to test our disaster readiness as a story · 259 points
HN discussionThe entire Python community was in pain over Python 3 for 10 years, even if migrating any particular program wasn't much trouble. If you want to contest the notion that there was pain, then fine: most of the community simply ignored Python 3 for 10 years, because there was no reason until quite late in the process to worry about it. I myself never bothered migrating any of my Python 2 stuff. It might not be difficul…
Comment linking /application/how-we-rolled-out-one-of-the-largest-python-3-migrations-ever
on “A viable solution for Python concurrency”Submitted Broccoli: Syncing Faster by Syncing Less as a story · 229 points
HN discussionI really don't know enough about Python to discuss it, so I usually don't. There have been some semi-recent developments re typechecking Python (see https://dropbox.tech/application/our-journey-to-type-checkin... ) that have made me interested in trying out for real.
Comment linking /application/our-journey-to-type-checking-4-million-lines-of-python
on “Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang”Submitted Machine learning saves us $1.7M a year on document previews as a story · 201 points
HN discussionFile system journaling typically refers to a log that helps ensure filesystem consistency by recording attempted operations before they happen, but the system still has to do all the same random writes to the disk afterwards. Some file systems (notably ZFS and Btrfs) use a copy-on-write approach that should in theory not require many random writes, but I don't think any of them are adapted for the large blocks you n…
Comment linking /infrastructure/smr-what-we-learned-in-our-first-year
on “Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording”Submitted How image search works at Dropbox as a story · 189 points
HN discussionDont know about web servers, but there are people doing it on the backup/storage side. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/lepton-image-compression...
Comment linking /infrastructure/lepton-image-compression-saving-22-losslessly-from-images-at-15mbs
on “H.264 is Magic (2016)”Submitted Testing Sync at Dropbox as a story · 180 points
HN discussionDefinitely much more of user data storage. More about that https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/inside-the-magic-pocket . Happy to take other questions.
Comment linking /infrastructure/inside-the-magic-pocket
on “S3 Strong Consistency”Submitted Rewriting the heart of our sync engine as a story · 158 points
HN discussionWait. Why? How? Their in-house system (Magic Pocket / Diskotech) seemed so promising. https://dropbox.tech/tag-results.magic-pocket
Comment linking /tag-results.magic-pocket
on “We saved millions in SSD costs by upgrading our filesystem”Submitted JQuery to React: How we rewrote the HelloSign editor as a story · 149 points
HN discussionNot sure if they still do, but Github used to run a decent amount of stuff on baremetal https://github.blog/2015-12-01-githubs-metal-cloud/ Afaik Dropbox Magic Pocket is bare metal (they have an internal baremetal provisioning system) https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/inside-the-magic-pocket Fastly's edge network I'm pretty sure is baremetal. JP Morgan Chase has a significant amount of non-containerized workloads…
Comment linking /infrastructure/inside-the-magic-pocket
on “Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?”Submitted Speeding up a Git monorepo as a story · 147 points
HN discussionI imagine following the tech blogs of certain companies - you can read about dropbox's engine rewrite here - https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...
Comment linking /infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine
on “Remix web framework aquired by Shopify”Submitted Engineering Dropbox Transfer: Making simple even simpler as a story · 141 points
HN discussionThanks. Updated links here https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/continuous-integration-a... https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/athena-our-automated-bui...
Comment linking /infrastructure/athena-our-automated-build-health-management-system
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2020)”Submitted The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus as a story · 135 points
HN discussionhttps://dropbox.tech/application/our-journey-to-type-checkin...
Comment linking /application/our-journey-to-type-checking-4-million-lines-of-python
on “Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming”Submitted Our journey from a Python monolith to a managed platform as a story · 133 points
HN discussionWe similarly did this at a hackathon. > Droplock is a tool to help you when your laptop is stolen... The thief is prompted with an option to donate to charity (through JustGiving, another BattleHack sponsor) or pay the laptop owner directly via Braintree. If they fail to take one of these options, the laptop gets locked down until payment is made. https://dropbox.tech/developers/droplock-a-dropbox-hack-wins...
Comment linking /developers/droplock-a-dropbox-hack-wins-battlehack-la
on “GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor”Submitted How we designed Dropbox’s ATF – an async task framework as a story · 122 points
HN discussion
