Google laid off staff from the Flutter, Dart and Python teams, TechCrunch reported this week. Google confirmed the layoffs to the news outlet but refused to specify details about the layoffs, including from which teams people are laid off. There was, however, an unhelpful quote from a spokesperson about the company becoming more efficient and aligning resources to company priorities in the coming year.
Needless to say, in the face of so little information, there were rumors and questions posted across social media, including on Reddit, where commenters wondered just how committed Google is to these projects.
One Hacker News poster suggested it’s time to re-evaluate reliance on Google offerings. “People have to stop building on Google software/apis,” the anonymous poster suggested. “You’re just doing it to yourself at this point if you have any other alternative (obviously Android isn’t included in this).”
However, Google Project Manager Kevin Moore posted in Reddit’s Flutter community that Flutter and Dart “weren’t affected any more or less than other teams.”
Another Reddit commentator claimed the Python team layoffs were those who managed the internal Python runtimes and toolchains and worked with OSS Python. “Included in this group were ‘multiple current and former core devs and steering council members.’”
It’s worth noting that Google didn’t eliminate its Python team, but replaced it with another group based in Munich, according to TechCrunch, citing Python Steering Council member Thomas Wouters’ post on Mastodon.
“It’s a tough day when everyone you work with directly, including your manager, is laid off — excuse me, ‘had their roles reduced,’ and you’re asked to onboard their replacements, people told to take those very same roles just in a different country who are not any happier about it,” Wouters wrote.
There’s no word on how layoffs might affect Flutter, the cross-platform development platform Google created, or Dart, the programming language, also developed by Google.
One poster, Martin DeMello, said on Hacker News that he was “caught up in this” and had lost the best job he’d ever had, but added, “We were a chronically understaffed team supporting a large part of the Python ecosystem at google, and we did some amazing work over the years.”
Flow is adding Component Syntax to provide first-class support for React primitives, such as components and hooks, to the Flow language.
“These features bring improved ergonomics, expressiveness, and static enforcement for many of the Rules of React,” Alex Taylor and Jordan Brown, both editors of Flow, stated in a blog post.
Flow is a static type checker for JavaScript. It analyzes code and detects potential errors related to data types before running the program, which helps improve code quality and reduces bugs in React development.
They added that the team at Meta has already adopted Component Syntax across its code bases, with incredible results.
“We’ve seen a massive reduction in boilerplate for writing components, we’ve caught thousands of violations of the Rules of React, and we’ve seen design systems codify their stylistic rules in the type system,” the team stated. “Most importantly, our engineers love the new features.”
Included in the upgrade area:
“As you can see, components are quite similar to functions, but with a few differences,” the team wrote. Those differences include:
Upgrade to Flow v0.233.0 or later for the new features.
Tabnine is integrating its AI coding assistant into the Atlassian platform, it was announced at the Atlassian Team 2024 conference.
The partnership will make it easier to integrate AI-enabled software development tools directly from Atlassian’s suite of enterprise software products. The new generative AI features will be available in Atlassian’s products later this year and will support engineering teamwork. Tabnine’s customers will be able to leverage the data and code captured across Atlassian’s Jira, Confluence and BitBucket.
