3 ms·

So many gems in this article. To help spot problems, Facebook employees who access the social network from within the company's internal network will always se

So many gems in this article. To help spot problems, Facebook employees who access the social network from within the company's internal network will always see an experimental build of the site based on the very latest code, including proposed changes that haven't officially been accepted. Probably the only place where your excuse for checking Facebook at work can be "Looking for bugs!" The many data sources tracked by Facebook's internal monitoring tools even include tweets about Facebook. That information is displayed in a graph with separate trend lines to show the change in volume of positive and negative remarks Guess I need to tweet more about how slow their mobile app is getting... One of the major ongoing development efforts at Facebook is a project to replace the HipHop transpiler. Facebook's developers are creating their own bytecode format and custom runtime environment.... the company can push thin bytecode deltas representing just the parts that have changed. Facebook may even be able to splice the updated bytecode into the application while it's running, avoiding a process restart. Even though I'm doing nothing nearly this awesome, this article has done more to inspire and excite me about my own coding than anything I've read in a long time.

mikeleeorg 15y ago
I'm also really intrigued by the "karma" rating for all of their developers. Can anyone speak to how well that is working? Has it been effective? Any negative side-effects? Is it just for the release process, or for any development effort?
- nbm 15y ago
  It is "Push karma", so generally only applies to the push process. It isn't visible to anyone but the pushers and yourself (at least, I can't see anyone else's push karma in the expected places). It isn't a complex rating system - there are probably 97% of people at the base karma level, maybe 0.1% at one rung higher, 2.7% at one rung lower, and 0.2% at lower than that. The "Push" tech talk at https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977 https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977 has more on it. Mostly it is a way of letting you know that you made people's lives difficult by holding up the push process by not being available to support your changes. You know that you won't get away with that, that you need to make up for it, and you also know when you've made up for it. (It also doesn't apply to a decent number of engineers, since they work on services and infrastructure that are not part of that process.)

mikeleeorg 15y ago

I'm also really intrigued by the "karma" rating for all of their developers. Can anyone speak to how well that is working? Has it been effective? Any negative side-effects? Is it just for the release process, or for any development effort?

nbm 15y ago
It is "Push karma", so generally only applies to the push process. It isn't visible to anyone but the pushers and yourself (at least, I can't see anyone else's push karma in the expected places). It isn't a complex rating system - there are probably 97% of people at the base karma level, maybe 0.1% at one rung higher, 2.7% at one rung lower, and 0.2% at lower than that. The "Push" tech talk at https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977 https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977 has more on it. Mostly it is a way of letting you know that you made people's lives difficult by holding up the push process by not being available to support your changes. You know that you won't get away with that, that you need to make up for it, and you also know when you've made up for it. (It also doesn't apply to a decent number of engineers, since they work on services and infrastructure that are not part of that process.)