7 ms·

“most engineers are capable of writing bug-free code. it’s just that they don’t have an incentive to do so at most companies. when there’s a QA department, it

by ajsharp 16y ago

“most engineers are capable of writing bug-free code. it’s just that they don’t have an incentive to do so at most companies. when there’s a QA department, it’s easy to just throw it over to them to find the errors.” Bull. Shit. This one line makes me think that this entire post is completely hear-say. A 500 person engineering team that writes bug-free code on a system as a large as facebook? Give me a break.

krobertson 16y ago
Agreed. Anyone who works with FB apps/apis surely notices their lack of QA leads to frequent and often times routine breakage.
- peeps 16y ago
  To be fair, the ridiculously low quality of their code makes me think that it's true that they don't really bother with testing or QA. It explains a lot, really.
- lukeschlather 16y ago
  I have my Facebook set on Spanish to keep my Spanish language neurons firing even when I'm surrounded by Gringos, and their localization definitely has frequent bugs. There's been some issues for months with the birthday wall post aggregation they've been testing in production. I've frequently seen stuff like "So-and-so has written on so-and-so's muro for their birthday." So yeah, lack of QA => lots of bugs.
  - nroman 16y ago
    Almost all of Facebook's internationalization is crowd-sourced. What you're seeing probably isn't a bug, the string just hasn't been translated by a user yet.
  - sidupadhyay 16y ago
    Facebook's language translations are actually crowdsourced. It's funny that so many people would approve errors like this. There is a brief blog post about it: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10056937130 http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10056937130 The whole system is pretty interesting. They maintain a mapping of every token on the site to every language and only user translators verify portions.
dacort 16y ago
As somebody that is frustrated by the Graph API nearly daily, their code is certainly not bug-free.
shalinmangar 16y ago
You may be taking this to an extreme. Besides, bugs aren't so bad if you can fix them fast.

by ajsharp 16y ago

krobertson 16y ago

Agreed. Anyone who works with FB apps/apis surely notices their lack of QA leads to frequent and often times routine breakage.

peeps 16y ago
To be fair, the ridiculously low quality of their code makes me think that it's true that they don't really bother with testing or QA. It explains a lot, really.
lukeschlather 16y ago
I have my Facebook set on Spanish to keep my Spanish language neurons firing even when I'm surrounded by Gringos, and their localization definitely has frequent bugs. There's been some issues for months with the birthday wall post aggregation they've been testing in production. I've frequently seen stuff like "So-and-so has written on so-and-so's muro for their birthday." So yeah, lack of QA => lots of bugs.
- nroman 16y ago
  Almost all of Facebook's internationalization is crowd-sourced. What you're seeing probably isn't a bug, the string just hasn't been translated by a user yet.
- sidupadhyay 16y ago
  Facebook's language translations are actually crowdsourced. It's funny that so many people would approve errors like this. There is a brief blog post about it: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10056937130 http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10056937130 The whole system is pretty interesting. They maintain a mapping of every token on the site to every language and only user translators verify portions.

dacort 16y ago

As somebody that is frustrated by the Graph API nearly daily, their code is certainly not bug-free.

shalinmangar 16y ago

You may be taking this to an extreme. Besides, bugs aren't so bad if you can fix them fast.