Google Javascript
SED 698 Transcript EPISODE 698 [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:00] JM: Google Search is a highly interactive JavaScript application. As you enter a query, results are being automatically suggested to you before you even finish typing. When you press enter, some of your search results may be widgets that represent the weather, or the price of a stock, or a recipe for green bean soup, or a language translation for praise. These complex frontend components are loading dynamically. The Google search application is not pre-fetching every single possible widget that you might ask for. It's not prefetching the weather widget, and the price of a stock widget, and the currency conversion widget. All of these things are a little bit expensive and they would slow down the page of Google were to pre-fetch the JavaScript for all of these different components, but the results do load very quickly. If you search for a currency conversion, Google loads the results of that currency conversion widget quite quickly. So you know that Google is doing some advanced JavaScript engineering to deliver you the code for that currency conversion widget very quickly, and Google has many other examples of advanced JavaScript programming. The company is mostly known for backend engineering inventions like MapReduce, and TensorFlow, and Dremel, and Spanner, and to turn these backend tools into user-facing products, Google develops its own JavaScript frameworks and infrastructure to deliver information from the backend to the frontend. Backend and frontend are terms that are not very precise. A backend is a backend only relative to a frontend, and at Google there are so many layers of infrastructure between a user and the data center, that if you're an engineer working on a service at Google, you probably have several frontends on one side of you and several backends on either side of you.
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