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When was the last time you were about to click a button on a website, only to have the page shift—causing you to click the wrong button instead? Or the last time you rage-quit a page that took too long to load? These problems are only amplified in applications as rich and interactive as ours. The more front-end code is written to support more complex features, the more bytes are sent to the browse

How we handled a recent phishing incident that targeted Dropbox We were recently the target of a phishing campaign that successfully accessed some of the code we store in GitHub. No one’s content, passwords, or payment information was accessed, and the issue was quickly resolved. Our core apps and infrastructure were also unaffected, as access to this code is even more limited and strictly control

Looking for our latest Engineering Career Framework? We made some updates in 2023. Learn more about the newest version. ~ ~ ~ At Dropbox, we strive to be a great place for all engineers to grow and be recognized for that growth. Our Engineering Career Framework helps keep us accountable there and is viewable by anyone within the company. Today, we are also making it viewable by anyone outside the

It’s probably happened to you at some point: You go to use a service for which you believe you’ve got a paid subscription, only to find that it’s been canceled for non-payment. That’s not only bad for you the customer: It causes negative feelings about the brand, it disrupts what should be a steady flow of revenue to the business, and a customer who finds themselves shut off might decide not to co

Photos are among the most common types of files in Dropbox, but searching for them by filename is even less productive than it is for text-based files.  When you're looking for that photo from a picnic a few years ago, you surely don't remember that the filename set by your camera was 2017-07-04 12.37.54.jpg. Instead, you look at individual photos, or thumbnails of them, and try to identify object

Memory leaks occur when an application allocates memory for an object, but then fails to release the memory when the object is no longer being used. Over time, leaked memory accumulates and results in poor app performance and even crashes. Leaks can happen in any program and on any platform, but they’re especially prevalent in Android apps due to complications with activity lifecycles. Recent Andr

Application startup is the first thing our users experience after they install an app and then again every single time they launch it. A simple and snappy application brings users a lot more joy than an application that has a ton of features but takes an eternity to load. Realizing this, Dropbox Android team has invested in measuring, identifying, and fixing the issues that were affecting our app

At Dropbox, we view incident management as a central element of our reliability efforts. Though we also employ proactive techniques such as Chaos engineering, how we respond to incidents has a significant bearing on our users’ experience. Every minute counts for our users during a potential site outage or product issue. The key components of our incident management process have been in place for s

I joined Dropbox not long after graduating with a Master’s degree in computer science. Aside from an internship, this was my first big-league engineering job. My team had already begun designing a critical internal service that most of our software would use: It would handle asynchronous computing requests behind the scenes, powering everything from dragging a file into a Dropbox folder to schedul

HelloSign is a Dropbox company that provides a Web-based eSignature solution: If you have a document you want someone to sign, you upload the document file, then show you an editor in which you place all the fields to build the form the recipient will fill out—signatures, dates, initials, etc. You send this prepared form to the recipient. When they’re done signing, everything is reassembled into a

// By Rishabh Jain and Daniel Reiter Horn • Aug 04, 2020 Dropbox syncs petabytes of data every day across millions of desktop clients. It is vital that we constantly improve the sync experience for our users, to increase our users’ productivity in their everyday lives. We also constantly strive to better leverage our infrastructure, increasing Dropbox’s operational efficiency. Because the files th

In this blogpost we’ll talk about the old Nginx-based traffic infrastructure, its pain points, and the benefits we gained by migrating to Envoy. We’ll compare Nginx to Envoy across many software engineering and operational dimensions. We’ll also briefly touch on the migration process, its current state, and some of the problems encountered on the way. When we moved most of Dropbox traffic to Envoy

Speeding up a Git monorepo at Dropbox with <200 lines of code We migrated from Mercurial to Git in 2014 to improve local performance and began consolidating our repositories that hosted our backend code. But as this monorepo grew, we experienced Git performance issues that grew linearly with the number of files we added. Inconveniently, this problem was the most severe on macOS—the platform most o

Editor’s preface: When I first joined Dropbox in May 2017, we were at the tail end of our CoffeeScript to TypeScript migration. If you wanted to make changes to a CoffeeScript file, it was considered common courtesy to convert it to TypeScript while you were at it. Parts of our codebase were still using react-dom-factories and we had a custom flux implementation predating Redux. I knew our web pla

…and how we rewrote the heart of sync with confidence. Executing a full rewrite of the Dropbox sync engine was pretty daunting. (Read more about our goals and how we made the decision in our previous post here.) Doing so meant taking the engine that powers Dropbox on hundreds of millions of user’s machines and swapping it out mid-flight. To pull this off, we knew we would need a serious investment

The Dropbox Traffic team is charged with innovating our application networking stack to improve the experience for every one of our users—over half a billion of them. This article describes our work with NS1 to optimize our intelligent DNS-based global load balancing for corner cases that we uncovered while improving our point of presence (PoP) selection automation for our edge network.By co-devel

Dropbox is a big user of Python. It’s our most widely used language both for backend services and the desktop client app (we are also heavy users of Go, TypeScript, and Rust). At our scale—millions of lines of Python—the dynamic typing in Python made code needlessly hard to understand and started to seriously impact productivity. To mitigate this, we have been gradually migrating our code to stati

This article assumes a working knowledge of Redux, React, React-Redux, TypeScript, and uses a little bit of Lodash for convenience. If you’re not familiar with those subjects, you might need to do some Googling. You can find the final version of all the code here. Redux has become the go-to state management system for React applications. While plenty of material exists about Redux best practices i