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Earlyish facebook engineer here. Early days FB php was nothing like the php used to template websites. All kinds of specialized libraries to enable a much more

Earlyish facebook engineer here. Early days FB php was nothing like the php used to template websites. All kinds of specialized libraries to enable a much more sophisticated programming style. Think functional helpers, and asynchronous execution on thousands of cores, spanning trees across data centers using ssh etc. As a tangent a lot of the good stuff I used was written by Evan Priestley, who also did Phabricator and lots of other strong systems.

iknowSFR 3y ago
Can you speak to the onboarding and learning curve in that environment? What was the training like? What kinds of timelines did you experience regarding expectations as a new hire? Asking because I’m curious about these early stage mega-tech companies that are working at a scale I can’t fathom.
- nikhizzle 3y ago
  Six week boot camp, you are pretty fluent by week 4. Notably though this was before mega tech days, we had under 100 engineers.
supernikio2 3y ago
I'm of course speaking from an outsider's point of view, but do you think PHP was a good option, or was it a "fitting a square peg into a round hole" situation?
- nikhizzle 3y ago
  It was not a deliberate choice, just it was what the site was built in, so people like Evan and Marcel (Laverdet) made php beautiful for us.
- troupo 3y ago
  > but do you think PHP was a good option, or was it a "fitting a square peg into a round hole" situation? Facebook was founded in 2004. Whatever fancy tech you're thinking that would fit the round hole, it didn't exist then. They also never thought it would serve a couple billion of users one day, so they built it in whatever they had and knew at the time. Same for Instagram and Python (they started with Django).
  - zitterbewegung 3y ago
    How they have used Instagram with Django is that they have replaced pieces of Django over time with custom parts which is a benefit of the design of Django.
TSUTiger 3y ago
Random question... whatever happened to that visual friend/network graph that used to load on a separate window? I always thought that thing was pretty neat to see
tyingq 3y ago
>Early days FB php was nothing like the php used to template websites. All kinds of specialized libraries to enable a much more sophisticated programming style. No idea if this was a credible leak of actual 2007-ish FB php, but it doesn't look like what you're describing. https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406 https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406

iknowSFR 3y ago

Can you speak to the onboarding and learning curve in that environment? What was the training like? What kinds of timelines did you experience regarding expectations as a new hire? Asking because I’m curious about these early stage mega-tech companies that are working at a scale I can’t fathom.

nikhizzle 3y ago
Six week boot camp, you are pretty fluent by week 4. Notably though this was before mega tech days, we had under 100 engineers.

supernikio2 3y ago

I'm of course speaking from an outsider's point of view, but do you think PHP was a good option, or was it a "fitting a square peg into a round hole" situation?

nikhizzle 3y ago
It was not a deliberate choice, just it was what the site was built in, so people like Evan and Marcel (Laverdet) made php beautiful for us.
troupo 3y ago
> but do you think PHP was a good option, or was it a "fitting a square peg into a round hole" situation? Facebook was founded in 2004. Whatever fancy tech you're thinking that would fit the round hole, it didn't exist then. They also never thought it would serve a couple billion of users one day, so they built it in whatever they had and knew at the time. Same for Instagram and Python (they started with Django).
- zitterbewegung 3y ago
  How they have used Instagram with Django is that they have replaced pieces of Django over time with custom parts which is a benefit of the design of Django.

TSUTiger 3y ago

Random question... whatever happened to that visual friend/network graph that used to load on a separate window? I always thought that thing was pretty neat to see

tyingq 3y ago

>Early days FB php was nothing like the php used to template websites. All kinds of specialized libraries to enable a much more sophisticated programming style. No idea if this was a credible leak of actual 2007-ish FB php, but it doesn't look like what you're describing. https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406 https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406