Top all-time · #52
Figma
Company blog · figma.com/blogdesignprogramming
Figma is the company blog at figma.com, writing about design and programming. Since 2013, 602 different Hacker News readers have linked it 894 times, most often “WebAssembly cut Figma's load time by 3x (2017)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Figma is the canvas where design, code, and AI come together. From first idea to shipped product — go from concept to production with your whole team, in one place.
Most-linked posts?
- WebAssembly cut Figma's load time by 3x (2017)42 people · 46 mentions · first linked 2019-03-17
- How Figma's Multiplayer Technology Works35 people · 37 mentions · first linked 2019-10-17
- Figma 1.0 – Collaborative interface design tool34 people · 38 mentions · first linked 2015-12-03
- Building a professional design tool on the web (2015)17 people · 31 mentions · first linked 2018-12-11
- How to build a plugin system on the web and also sleep well at night17 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2019-08-22
- An Update on Plugin Security15 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2019-10-03
- /13 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2016-11-02
- Figma announces FigJam: an online whiteboard for teams to ideate and brainstorm11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2021-04-21
- Rust in Production (2018)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-01-08
- Desperately Seeking Squircles (2018)8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-04-26
What Hacker News says?
The forward looking statements disclaimer at the end of their announcement post is such a sharp tone shift it's almost funny - https://www.figma.com/blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/
Comment linking /blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/
on “Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B”Submitted How to build a plugin system on the web and also sleep well at night as a story · 685 points
HN discussionhere to complain about bloomberg.com - couldn't find any content to read on that page. https://www.figma.com/blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/
Comment linking /blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/
on “Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B”Submitted How Figma's databases team lived to tell the scale as a story · 568 points
HN discussionThis is probably the only tech acquisition that's ever made me sad. I just hate Adobe so much. The nightmare of their installer, the weird store with horrible designs popping up when you activate normal ui stuff, the difficulty in canceling a subscription, and the stasis in their product and ui. Oh and the sloppiness of Lightroom on mac with it's weird ui and that it didn't even import and manage photos well. I've b…
Comment linking /blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x/
on “Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B”Submitted Figma files for proposed IPO as a story · 515 points
HN discussionYou'd never be able to compete because the design is the product. You'd just be stuck copying them, always one step behind. Their interface's responsiveness is also a consequence of writing a rendering engine in WASM, so you'd have to figure that out too. [1] Plus the real-time collab. I don't know why you pretend as if these aren't difficult engineering problems to solve. [1] https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-…
Comment linking /blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x/
on “Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B”Submitted Figma Slides as a story · 486 points
HN discussionUPDATE n. 2: Dylan Field (CEO of Figma) has addressed these kind of concerns on their public disclore of the fact: https://www.figma.com/blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/ Citing him: > Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously and I will continue to serve as CEO, reporting to David Wadhwani. As others have said, there’s really a missing OSS version out there that can compete feature-by-fea…
Comment linking /blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/
on “Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B”Submitted Figma 1.0 – Collaborative interface design tool as a story · 340 points
HN discussionBlogpost from figma: https://www.figma.com/blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/
Comment linking /blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/
on “Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B”Submitted Figma will IPO on July 31 as a story · 333 points
HN discussion> Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously and I will continue to serve as CEO, reporting to David Wadhwani. [0] "autonomously". There, I fixed it for you :-) More seriously, I do hope that this will become an exception to the rule, but I'm not getting my hopes up. 0: https://www.figma.com/blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/
Comment linking /blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/
on “Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B”Submitted How we migrated onto K8s in less than 12 months as a story · 298 points
HN discussionFigma's blog post title [0] being 'A collaboration with Adobe', when it's really an acquisition seems like a warning sign. [0] https://www.figma.com/blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/
Comment linking /blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/
on “Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B”Submitted How Figma's Multiplayer Technology Works as a story · 268 points
HN discussionThis isn’t so much a data structure than an implementation of one, but map-represented trees are great. For context, they were used by Figma to represent its scene-graph ( https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology... ). Essentially, it’s a way to represent a normal tree as a map; keys of the map represent individual nodes on the trees, and one key “ROOT” points to the rootmost node. Each node is c…
Comment linking /blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/
on “Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?”Submitted Figma’s Journey to TypeScript as a story · 261 points
HN discussionI like almost everything from this project, even the documentation and development is being done in the open, with design docs like this: https://www.figma.com/design/qdCWR4tTUr7vQSecEjCyqO/DOCS?nod...
Comment linking /design/qdCWR4tTUr7vQSecEjCyqO/DOCS?node-id=7754-20045
on “Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline”Submitted When Fonts Fall as a story · 244 points
HN discussionI'm trying to respond in good faith, even though I feel you unnecessarily resorted to trying to condescend me. You wrote: > there is a difference between two APIs > that both still work and having one > stable API. As I explained, "this is the direct effect of high levels of backwards compatability. You can't change APIs; you have to create new APIs and then deprecate previous APIs." I thought my point was obvious,…
Comment linking /
on “Modern Javascript: Everything you missed over the last 10 years (2020)”Submitted Figma AI as a story · 240 points
HN discussionFigma is built in Web-Assembly (compiled from C++) [1] and Canvas, basically sidestepping the vast majority of the web stack. That's why it's fast. [1]: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...
Comment linking /blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x/
on “Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering”Submitted How the new open-source typeface used by GitHub and Mozilla came to be as a story · 213 points
HN discussionWe use PG replication slots and listen to updates. This doesn't add much load to the database -- it's similar to having a read replica. Adding more servers would mean more replication slots, and could slow down PG. When this happens, we'll likely replicate PG's WAL onto Something like Kafa. This is what LiveGraph does [1] [1] https://www.figma.com/blog/livegraph-real-time-data-fetching...
Comment linking /blog/livegraph-real-time-data-fetching-at-figma/
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted How Figma’s multiplayer technology works (2019) as a story · 176 points
HN discussionWe use the concept of 'topics'. A topic encodes: 'The part of the index a query cares about'. For example, given a query like "fetch user where id = 1", there could be a topic like "users:id:1" [1] When a WAL record comes in, we find queries by their topics, and invalidate them. This triggers a refresh. This is inspired by Figma's LiveGraph [2], which in turn is inspired by Asana's Luna [3]. The essays cover the ide…
Comment linking /blog/livegraph-real-time-data-fetching-at-figma/
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted A case study on strict null checks as a story · 166 points
HN discussionThat’s very interesting! Have they documented the reasoning for that approach? I would have expected iframes to be both simpler and faster sandboxing mechanism especially in compute bound cases. Maybe the communication overhead is too high in their workload? EDIT: found this from your other comment: https://www.figma.com/blog/an-update-on-plugin-security/ they do not address any alternatives considered.
Comment linking /blog/an-update-on-plugin-security/
on “Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS”Submitted Speeding up C++ build times as a story · 165 points
HN discussion
