Top all-time · #1620
KA Engineering
Company blog · engineering.khanacademy.orgprogramming
KA Engineering is the company blog at engineering.khanacademy.org, writing about programming. Since 2015, 45 different Hacker News readers have linked it 95 times, most often “Forgo JavaScript packaging? Not so fast”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (27) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Khan Academy's engineering blog for posts on its own stack, including the move from Python to Go, HTTP/2 JavaScript packaging, and the Aphrodite CSS library. Job postings also appear.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 27 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Forgo JavaScript packaging? Not so fast6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-11-23
- Go + Services = One Goliath Project4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-12-21
- How we successfully handled 2.5x traffic in a week3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-05-09
- Inline CSS at Khan Academy: Aphrodite3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-03-29
- tota11y – an accessibility visualization toolkit3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-06-08
- Go and Services = One Goliath Project2 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-12-20
- Using static analysis in Python, JavaScript and more to make your system safer2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-07-26
- /posts/kotlin-adoption.htm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-12
- Minimizing the length of regular expressions, in practice2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-05-26
- Starting Android at Khan Academy2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-29
What Hacker News says?
I don't think there's a real difference https://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/original-serverles...
Comment linking /posts/original-serverless.htm
on “Serverless: slower and more expensive”Submitted Go + Services = One Goliath Project as a story · 418 points
HN discussionKhan Academy | Mountain View, CA and REMOTE USA/CANADA | Senior Backend / Fullstack | https://khanacademy.org/careers We're a non-profit with a mission to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. It's a big mission that we're taking on step by step. While we want anyone to be able to get a great education independently, we've been focusing a lot on trying to help teachers working in their classroom…
Comment linking /posts/goliath.htm
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring right now?”Submitted How we successfully handled 2.5x traffic in a week as a story · 154 points
HN discussionKhan Academy is still hiring, though our focus is backend and full-stack engineers right now[1]. I hope you're able to find new work soon! This is an odd time for us. We're an online education non-profit. With all of the school closings[2], we're seeing a huge spike in traffic. Fortunately, our infrastructure can handle it, but we are still spending some effort staying on top of the rapidly changing traffic patterns…
Comment linking /posts/goliath.htm
on “Ask HN: Have you been laid off?”Submitted Time Management at Khan Academy as a story · 144 points
HN discussionHey HN! I built this utility with the help of two colleagues[0][1] after working on accessibility at Khan Academy for a few weeks, and seeing first-hand the process of evangelizing accessibility on a dev team. Our automated tests were far from approachable (and became more annoying than helpful), so we built tota11y to make the manual testing experience more interactive and educational (we like teaching things). I t…
Comment linking /posts/tota11y.htm
on “Tota11y”Submitted Memcached-Backed Content Infrastructure at Khan Academy as a story · 93 points
HN discussionKhan Academy | Mountain View, CA or REMOTE | full-time and internships We're a small, non-profit tech startup bringing a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Millions of people use our free educational platform to learn every month. The testimonials at https://www.khanacademy.org/stories will give you a feel for just how intense an impact Khan Academy has on the lives of folks in all sorts of varied situ…
Comment linking /posts/starting-android.htm
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2016)”Submitted Making thumbnails fast as a story · 70 points
HN discussionFor reasons I touch on in our blog post[1], porting to Python 3 would still be a huge amount of work (not quite as large as the port to Go, but still very large and without other benefits we get from Go). [1]: http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm
Comment linking /posts/goliath.htm
on “Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load”Submitted The Original Serverless Architecture Is Still Here as a story · 65 points
HN discussionOur videos are hosted on YouTube, which definitely reduces our outgoing bandwidth cost. Compute is actually a big part of our costs, because we do a lot of processing for things like tracking learner progress and connecting students with their classroom assignments. This kind of thing grows linearly with usage. We're working to move to Go, which will make a big difference in this part of our bill. http://engineering…
Comment linking /posts/goliath.htm
on “Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load”Submitted Forgo JavaScript packaging? Not so fast as a story · 55 points
HN discussionHere is the article explaining their plans to move to Go. https://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm
Comment linking /posts/goliath.htm
on “Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load”Submitted No Cheating Allowed as a story · 52 points
HN discussionKhan Academy's engineering blog is great if you're into Google App Engine, React, ... http://engineering.khanacademy.org
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?”Submitted Khan Academy’s Transition to React Native as a story · 36 points
HN discussionWe have some dataflow jobs written in Kotlin (we blogged about that in June 2018[1]). We also have an internal service written in Kotlin. We ideally want one language. But Apache Beam (which is behind Google Dataflow) doesn't yet have production support for Go. More importantly, though, we have no time pressure on switching the Kotlin code over, so that's a long way out. [1]: https://engineering.khanacademy.org/post…
Comment linking /posts/kotlin-adoption.htm
on “Go + Services = One Goliath Project”Submitted Engineering career development at Khan Academy as a story · 30 points
HN discussionKhan Academy | Mountain View, CA / Remote US+Canada | Senior Backend or Full-Stack Engineer https://www.khanacademy.org/careers A lot more people have become acquainted with Khan Academy over the past couple of weeks as parents and teachers have been looking for resources to help students learn at home. We're a non-profit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. This mission res…
Comment linking /posts/goliath.htm
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2020)”Submitted Khan Academy's Engineering Principles as a story · 22 points
HN discussionHi! Good questions. 1. Engineering is somewhere around 75 people (including management) 2. The principles doc is open to the public. I'm not sure why you're unable to view it. The high level principles are "We champion quality", "We nurture every engineer", "We collaborate compassionately", and there's more detail in the doc. The principles reflect both how we work and how we want to work. Our VP of Engineering refl…
Comment linking /posts/eng-principles-help-scale.htm
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2020)”Submitted How wooden puzzles can destroy dev teams as a story · 19 points
HN discussionKhan Academy | Senior Fullstack / Backend Engineers | Mountain View, CA or Remote | https://www.khanacademy.org/careers Khan Academy is a ten-year-old non-profit with a mission of a "free world-class education for anyone, anywhere". We're used by millions of learners every month both in the classroom and in their homes. We've got tools for teachers and coaches, plus the official SAT Prep, and a bunch more. I recentl…
Comment linking /posts/goliath.htm
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2020)”Submitted Babel in Khan Academy's Internationalization Toolchain as a story · 18 points
HN discussionSorry for the late reply. Multiplexing is not a panacea, there's still some overhead, and even if there wasn't there's still a point where you start to lose lot of performance by limiting gzip compression (the smaller the file the less efficient the compression is). You can read more about why we'll always need a bundling step at the following links: http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/js-packaging-http2.... ht…
Comment linking /posts/js-packaging-http2.htm
on “ECMAScript 2016+ in Firefox”Submitted Our Transition to React Native as a story · 11 points
HN discussionInteresting research about http2 - http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/js-packaging-http2....
Comment linking /posts/js-packaging-http2.htm
on “Google recommends inlining small CSS”Submitted i18nize-templates: Internationalization After the Fact as a story · 11 points
HN discussion
