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I must be really out of the loop because I just don't see enough of what Facebook is doing to justify all of this garbage. There's a lot of lip service in the a

I must be really out of the loop because I just don't see enough of what Facebook is doing to justify all of this garbage. There's a lot of lip service in the article about user experience, and I guess there are some changes here and there, but wtf is happening here? I definitely want and use CI/CD tools for my team's software, but what the fuck are you really doing when you are making this many changes per day? Call me an old fart, but if you are in a situation where you need to make that many changes per day, you are utterly fucked from almost every angle. Every aspect of this article sounds to me like people have no idea what they are trying to do, so they write code and push it, and it goes live. And everyone is very happy about this, for some insane reason. No offense to anyone, but this is not a reality I want to live in. And the article doesn't do much to defend the notion.

aytekin 9y ago
- They are running a lot of tests to see what works. - They are doing a lot of fixes. The number of bugs found is proportional to the number of users you have and number of changes you are making.
flukus 9y ago
"Just because you can doesn't mean you should", seems like they forgot about this principal. I think it's important that you can commit and push to prod quickly, shit happens and you need to be able to fix it quickly. But I agree with you, I'm a user not an alpha (or dev) tester.
coldtea 9y ago
The parent makes a point. Across their whole product line (client apps, Hip Hop VMs, Flow, whatever), there might be millions of lines of code. But what exactly seems to actually change year over year on FB itself (server/client of the actual social website) that warrants so many commits?
- cromulent 9y ago
  I would suspect that the engagement level of the site changes. They have the audience to be able to run massive amounts of experimentation to see how people use the site and respond to advertising. To the average user, not much changes except for a feed of news.
  - pja 9y ago
    Exactly. Only yesterday, my partner was complaining about how the like icons on her FaceBook page had become animated. Mine were static at the time - clearly FB had put her in a test bucket for some 'do animated like icons increase engagement?' test. FB does this stuff all the time.

aytekin 9y ago

- They are running a lot of tests to see what works. - They are doing a lot of fixes. The number of bugs found is proportional to the number of users you have and number of changes you are making.

flukus 9y ago

"Just because you can doesn't mean you should", seems like they forgot about this principal. I think it's important that you can commit and push to prod quickly, shit happens and you need to be able to fix it quickly. But I agree with you, I'm a user not an alpha (or dev) tester.

coldtea 9y ago

The parent makes a point. Across their whole product line (client apps, Hip Hop VMs, Flow, whatever), there might be millions of lines of code. But what exactly seems to actually change year over year on FB itself (server/client of the actual social website) that warrants so many commits?

cromulent 9y ago
I would suspect that the engagement level of the site changes. They have the audience to be able to run massive amounts of experimentation to see how people use the site and respond to advertising. To the average user, not much changes except for a feed of news.
- pja 9y ago
  Exactly. Only yesterday, my partner was complaining about how the like icons on her FaceBook page had become animated. Mine were static at the time - clearly FB had put her in a test bucket for some 'do animated like icons increase engagement?' test. FB does this stuff all the time.