8 ms·

The SCM ecosystem at Facebook is tremendously powerful and the result of some of the best minds at Facebook working on those systems for many years. From the s

by ctur 4y ago

The SCM ecosystem at Facebook is tremendously powerful and the result of some of the best minds at Facebook working on those systems for many years. From the scaling of the monorepos to the code review workflows, nothing really matches it. The ergonomics of most of the tooling was simply top notch (which it needed to be... engineers, particularly at Meta, are an opinionated lot who don't tolerate poor tools). It's great to see this out in the wild now.

peppertree 4y ago
After doing a round of onsite with fb tools team, I got the impression there were lots of bright engineers that wanted fb pay without having to touch fb products.
- jfengel 4y ago
  A lot of programmers would rather write tools for other programmers than for non-programmer end users. It's the target market that they know best, and it's most prestigious. I wish more of those bright engineers would try to solve problems for other users rather than re-re-re-re-re-optimizing the life of their colleagues. But writing code for users involves, among other things, knowing something about users, which is more bogged down and less fun.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    Their colleagues ARE users, they are just a different type, and a type that engineers understand more. I would rather a good engineer put their skills towards helping others use their skills more effectively than put that same engineer in a place where they don't like the work and produce below par results.
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    For some of us it's really hard to understand / solve problems of people whose life is spent on browsing instagram most of the time - when it's not TikTok.
    - hobs 4y ago
      Start by removing a heap of condescension and recognizing that there's interesting problems all around you.
      - NumberCruncher 4y ago
        Dealing drugs involves solving interesting problems too nevertheless IMHO it is bad for society and I try to avoid both dealers and addicts if possible.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        giraffe_lady 4y ago
        Funny because I've had a lot more positive experiences with and, frankly, respect for, addicts than software engineers.
        cto_of_antifa 4y ago
        samhw 4y ago
        Couldn't agree more. Anyone who survives and escapes that - including several of my close friends - is a fucking strong person. If I have to read one more comment disparaging addicts and then whining about how sOcIaL MeDiA Is a dAnGeRoUs aDdIcTiOn, I might actually blow my brains out.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      This is an unkind comment. Why condescend like this?
  - OJFord 4y ago
    But on the contrary.. many of the things well-built for the majority of 'non-programmer end users' are not the way I (as a 'programmer end user', whether the particular thing is a programming-adjacent tool or not) would ideally like them to be. So I'd selfishly adjust it to 'solve other problems for the same users'! Asahi, for example, awesome stuff - I've lost count how many times I've had to explain (to both colleagues and non-engineer family/friends/etc.) 'no no, absolutely agree, love Mac hardware [...]'.
  - stevage 4y ago
    I'm very curious what made you say that building tooling for developers is "most prestigious". It doesn't really match my intuition, can you explain more?
    - mi_lk 4y ago
      +1, that statement needs a citation, dev tools team is not more prestigious than some medium teams in FAANG in my experience
      - botverse 4y ago
        I’d say citation is not needed when the person has experience in the field, can cite himself telling you their opinion and that will suffice. Your opinion may differ of course
  - zem 4y ago
    I work on developer tools at google, and it's not even remotely one of the prestigious teams. it is however the most fun and interesting time I've ever had in a job, and if I left it would only be for the same kind of work. also you seem to have fallen for the same fallacy as the people who complain about open source devs not working on what they consider sufficiently important problems. trust me, there are no shortage of engineers willing and eager to work on end user problems, and the dev tools work enables them to deliver solutions to those problems faster, and makes those solutions work more reliably. it's a rising tide that lifts everyone's boats, not a zero sum game.
    - skeletonjelly 4y ago
      > I work on developer tools at google, and it's not even remotely one of the prestigious teams Out of interest, what is? (In your opinion)
      - zem 4y ago
        hard to say from inside the company, since you get to thinking of everyone as just colleagues who happen to be working on different parts of the system. but in terms of larger world prestige I would say the machine learning folks are definitely up there, also the internet/petabyte scale stuff that other developers know enough about the difficulties behind to be impressed by (spanner for instance), and perhaps go since it has achieved a massive amount of popularity. I honestly don't know if there are currently any end user google products "sexy" enough that working on them is extra prestigious.
        H8crilA 4y ago
        You're missing webranking, and other core components of core products. Deciding in which order results pop up on google.com is both very challenging and we'll recognized. Same with people that do ad ranking, people that manage the enormous storage systems, etc. If it is core to the company it is prestigious, you never have to explain the impact of your job.
      - ngc248 4y ago
  - siloed 4y ago
    They are definitely not "it's [sic] most prestigious" market, but they inspire admiration among other devs
  - Siira 4y ago
    Considering the state of our tooling, where documentation frequently does not show up without extensive config or is not soft-wrapped in Jetbrains products (which are only possibly second to Visual Studio in overall quality), and projects simply stop compiling and need magic tricks like invalidating caches to work again (and sometimes the trick reduces to reinstall every thing and delete all config), I don’t see how more tooling is so scorned.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  > I got the impression there were lots of bright engineers that wanted fb pay without having to touch fb products. I chose a job at Google Engprod (a tooling/developer productivity org) because I specifically like to work on dev tooling and I'm much less interested in working on products aimed at end users. Surely, many engineers at FB feel the same way.
jjcm 4y ago
FWIW this is also true on the design side. I've researched a lot of design teams and their custom tooling (I worked on design tools at Atlassian and now am working on them at Figma). Facebooks is leagues above the rest. I've been blown away at what they do there. Some really amazing engineering and design thinking happening on Facebook's internal tooling.
- pronlover723 4y ago
  I'd love to know concretely what this means. I don't feel like I see 100s of design related stuff coming out of FB so it's hard to imagine they even need design tools. Maybe I'm just not aware of all of FBs products and world class design.
  - wkirby 4y ago
    Not OP, but the first thing that comes to mind is https://origami.design/ https://origami.design/
    - scns 4y ago
      Look around on the page, couldn't find the info. Does it use React Native underneath?
      - dljsjr 4y ago
        It's a prototyping tool, I don't believe it has any codegen facilities. It used to be a Quartz Composer framework and then it evolved in to a standalone app.
influx 4y ago
It's powerful, but fbcode is sloooooooow.
- martincmartin 4y ago
  How so? I never thought of it as slow. Source: Was a Meta infra engineer until last month, working in CDN & LogDevice, among other teams.
  - influx 4y ago
    What else have you used? Source: Meta infra PE until last month, but have used build and source system at Amazon and found it faster.
    - martincmartin 4y ago
      Yeah the fbcode build system was hella slow. A minute plus just to build the "action graph." I did marvel at all the lost productivity, especially since an minute plus is enough time for me to context switch to another task, or at least go get (another) cup of tea... Mercurial / Eden were pretty fast though. Never had complaints about them.
      - ai_ja_nai 4y ago
        you should have tried buck2 ;) instantaneous
Yeroc 4y ago
Do you know how this compares to Microsoft's efforts to scale git via the Scalar [https://github.com/microsoft/scalar https://github.com/microsoft/scalar] project?
tehlike 4y ago
As a facebook employee, and a former google employee, I prefer google's SCM system and tooling instead.. Cider, Piper, CitC, Blaze, etc make a really complete system. Nothing beats it. This is kind of also surprising because product speed at Fb is much better :)
- strongpigeon 4y ago
  Without a doubt, CitC/Piper/Blaze/Critique/Code Search is what I miss the most from Google. As you've said it really feels like a complete system. I'd pay decent money for a hosted version of it.
  - tehlike 4y ago
    Did you get a chance to try cider by any chance? I miss it pretty often
    - strongpigeon 4y ago
      I thought Cider was all right. It’s useful and good enough, but I still preferred VS Code even though it’s not as integrated.
  - mleonhard 4y ago
    I would pay for that, too, but only if it was provided by another company (not Google).
- ai_ja_nai 4y ago
  Isn't buck a replacement for blaze?
  - tehlike 4y ago
    It is, more or less equivalent, but buck integration with piper/citc/cider makes it currently more comprehensive than fb infra. Fb is getting there but much slower. So i was more or less talking overall...
LightG 4y ago
smcnally 4y ago
> code review workflows I see nothing about review workflows in Eden’s README. Any pointers to example tooling — Presentations, code, screenshots — in the wild?
lenkite 4y ago
Now all they need to do is build https://www.edenhub.com https://www.edenhub.com and I'll move my personal projects. I have never grokked git, despite multiple attempts.

by ctur 4y ago

peppertree 4y ago

After doing a round of onsite with fb tools team, I got the impression there were lots of bright engineers that wanted fb pay without having to touch fb products.

jfengel 4y ago
A lot of programmers would rather write tools for other programmers than for non-programmer end users. It's the target market that they know best, and it's most prestigious. I wish more of those bright engineers would try to solve problems for other users rather than re-re-re-re-re-optimizing the life of their colleagues. But writing code for users involves, among other things, knowing something about users, which is more bogged down and less fun.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Their colleagues ARE users, they are just a different type, and a type that engineers understand more. I would rather a good engineer put their skills towards helping others use their skills more effectively than put that same engineer in a place where they don't like the work and produce below par results.
- xiphias2 4y ago
  For some of us it's really hard to understand / solve problems of people whose life is spent on browsing instagram most of the time - when it's not TikTok.
  - hobs 4y ago
    Start by removing a heap of condescension and recognizing that there's interesting problems all around you.
    - NumberCruncher 4y ago
      Dealing drugs involves solving interesting problems too nevertheless IMHO it is bad for society and I try to avoid both dealers and addicts if possible.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - giraffe_lady 4y ago
        Funny because I've had a lot more positive experiences with and, frankly, respect for, addicts than software engineers.
        cto_of_antifa 4y ago
        samhw 4y ago
        Couldn't agree more. Anyone who survives and escapes that - including several of my close friends - is a fucking strong person. If I have to read one more comment disparaging addicts and then whining about how sOcIaL MeDiA Is a dAnGeRoUs aDdIcTiOn, I might actually blow my brains out.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    This is an unkind comment. Why condescend like this?
- OJFord 4y ago
  But on the contrary.. many of the things well-built for the majority of 'non-programmer end users' are not the way I (as a 'programmer end user', whether the particular thing is a programming-adjacent tool or not) would ideally like them to be. So I'd selfishly adjust it to 'solve other problems for the same users'! Asahi, for example, awesome stuff - I've lost count how many times I've had to explain (to both colleagues and non-engineer family/friends/etc.) 'no no, absolutely agree, love Mac hardware [...]'.
- stevage 4y ago
  I'm very curious what made you say that building tooling for developers is "most prestigious". It doesn't really match my intuition, can you explain more?
  - mi_lk 4y ago
    +1, that statement needs a citation, dev tools team is not more prestigious than some medium teams in FAANG in my experience
    - botverse 4y ago
      I’d say citation is not needed when the person has experience in the field, can cite himself telling you their opinion and that will suffice. Your opinion may differ of course
- zem 4y ago
  I work on developer tools at google, and it's not even remotely one of the prestigious teams. it is however the most fun and interesting time I've ever had in a job, and if I left it would only be for the same kind of work. also you seem to have fallen for the same fallacy as the people who complain about open source devs not working on what they consider sufficiently important problems. trust me, there are no shortage of engineers willing and eager to work on end user problems, and the dev tools work enables them to deliver solutions to those problems faster, and makes those solutions work more reliably. it's a rising tide that lifts everyone's boats, not a zero sum game.
  - skeletonjelly 4y ago
    > I work on developer tools at google, and it's not even remotely one of the prestigious teams Out of interest, what is? (In your opinion)
    - zem 4y ago
      hard to say from inside the company, since you get to thinking of everyone as just colleagues who happen to be working on different parts of the system. but in terms of larger world prestige I would say the machine learning folks are definitely up there, also the internet/petabyte scale stuff that other developers know enough about the difficulties behind to be impressed by (spanner for instance), and perhaps go since it has achieved a massive amount of popularity. I honestly don't know if there are currently any end user google products "sexy" enough that working on them is extra prestigious.
      - H8crilA 4y ago
        You're missing webranking, and other core components of core products. Deciding in which order results pop up on google.com is both very challenging and we'll recognized. Same with people that do ad ranking, people that manage the enormous storage systems, etc. If it is core to the company it is prestigious, you never have to explain the impact of your job.
    - ngc248 4y ago
- siloed 4y ago
  They are definitely not "it's [sic] most prestigious" market, but they inspire admiration among other devs
- Siira 4y ago
  Considering the state of our tooling, where documentation frequently does not show up without extensive config or is not soft-wrapped in Jetbrains products (which are only possibly second to Visual Studio in overall quality), and projects simply stop compiling and need magic tricks like invalidating caches to work again (and sometimes the trick reduces to reinstall every thing and delete all config), I don’t see how more tooling is so scorned.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
> I got the impression there were lots of bright engineers that wanted fb pay without having to touch fb products. I chose a job at Google Engprod (a tooling/developer productivity org) because I specifically like to work on dev tooling and I'm much less interested in working on products aimed at end users. Surely, many engineers at FB feel the same way.

jjcm 4y ago

FWIW this is also true on the design side. I've researched a lot of design teams and their custom tooling (I worked on design tools at Atlassian and now am working on them at Figma). Facebooks is leagues above the rest. I've been blown away at what they do there. Some really amazing engineering and design thinking happening on Facebook's internal tooling.

pronlover723 4y ago
I'd love to know concretely what this means. I don't feel like I see 100s of design related stuff coming out of FB so it's hard to imagine they even need design tools. Maybe I'm just not aware of all of FBs products and world class design.
- wkirby 4y ago
  Not OP, but the first thing that comes to mind is https://origami.design/ https://origami.design/
  - scns 4y ago
    Look around on the page, couldn't find the info. Does it use React Native underneath?
    - dljsjr 4y ago
      It's a prototyping tool, I don't believe it has any codegen facilities. It used to be a Quartz Composer framework and then it evolved in to a standalone app.

influx 4y ago

It's powerful, but fbcode is sloooooooow.

martincmartin 4y ago
How so? I never thought of it as slow. Source: Was a Meta infra engineer until last month, working in CDN & LogDevice, among other teams.
- influx 4y ago
  What else have you used? Source: Meta infra PE until last month, but have used build and source system at Amazon and found it faster.
  - martincmartin 4y ago
    Yeah the fbcode build system was hella slow. A minute plus just to build the "action graph." I did marvel at all the lost productivity, especially since an minute plus is enough time for me to context switch to another task, or at least go get (another) cup of tea... Mercurial / Eden were pretty fast though. Never had complaints about them.
    - ai_ja_nai 4y ago
      you should have tried buck2 ;) instantaneous

Yeroc 4y ago

Do you know how this compares to Microsoft's efforts to scale git via the Scalar [https://github.com/microsoft/scalar https://github.com/microsoft/scalar] project?

tehlike 4y ago

As a facebook employee, and a former google employee, I prefer google's SCM system and tooling instead.. Cider, Piper, CitC, Blaze, etc make a really complete system. Nothing beats it. This is kind of also surprising because product speed at Fb is much better :)

strongpigeon 4y ago
Without a doubt, CitC/Piper/Blaze/Critique/Code Search is what I miss the most from Google. As you've said it really feels like a complete system. I'd pay decent money for a hosted version of it.
- tehlike 4y ago
  Did you get a chance to try cider by any chance? I miss it pretty often
  - strongpigeon 4y ago
    I thought Cider was all right. It’s useful and good enough, but I still preferred VS Code even though it’s not as integrated.
- mleonhard 4y ago
  I would pay for that, too, but only if it was provided by another company (not Google).
ai_ja_nai 4y ago
Isn't buck a replacement for blaze?
- tehlike 4y ago
  It is, more or less equivalent, but buck integration with piper/citc/cider makes it currently more comprehensive than fb infra. Fb is getting there but much slower. So i was more or less talking overall...

LightG 4y ago

smcnally 4y ago

> code review workflows I see nothing about review workflows in Eden’s README. Any pointers to example tooling — Presentations, code, screenshots — in the wild?

lenkite 4y ago

Now all they need to do is build https://www.edenhub.com https://www.edenhub.com and I'll move my personal projects. I have never grokked git, despite multiple attempts.