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Facebook but for different reasons than most. We called this swapping out the airplane parts mid-flight A lot of effort goes into language design and tooling

Facebook but for different reasons than most. We called this swapping out the airplane parts mid-flight A lot of effort goes into language design and tooling to enable continuous migration of code. Rather than re-writing entire repos, existing code is continuously upgraded through semi- & fully-automated code-mods. Every day thousands of patches are landed to upgrade APIs with new type safety, security restrictions, deprecations and other code maintenance. Most other company repos I worked on had major re-writes outside of the mainline until one day there was a sudden and often troublesome switch-over to the new code. Code is constantly changing, and unless you have a continuous process for landing and testing those changes, you are going to suffer when you try to apply the changes needed to address the accumulated tech-debt.

lanstin 2y ago
I really wish more people believed in continuous improvement and the malleability of software. Giant heroic refactors or redos are so annoying, but so are ten year old compiler or kernels.
ceejayoz 2y ago
> We called this swapping out the airplane parts mid-flight... I work fairly heavily with Facebook's Graph API, and I think they may have employed too many Boeing engineers for the part swaps lately.
- tonymet 2y ago
  Most of the compatibility issues over the past few years at least have been due to added privacy restrictions and reduced permissions scoping.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    The same few years have seen the developer bug tool closed down in favor of the mostly abandoned “community forums” no one uses. We had big multi-year bugs in “assigned” state before its closure, too.
    - tonymet 2y ago
      That’s true too. The developer api is no longer a major growth generator as it once was. What remains is the bare minimum to keep partners happy, typically ads vendors
fragmede 2y ago
> We called this swapping out the airplane parts mid-flight... At ksplice we swapped the code out from under the kernel without rebooting, so I know what you mean.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
For curious readers, the "building a plane as it flies" metaphor dates back to at least 2000, to these commercials for EDS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2zqTYgcpfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2zqTYgcpfg I thought it was IBM but I was quite mistaken, so good thing I looked it up lol

lanstin 2y ago

I really wish more people believed in continuous improvement and the malleability of software. Giant heroic refactors or redos are so annoying, but so are ten year old compiler or kernels.

ceejayoz 2y ago

> We called this swapping out the airplane parts mid-flight... I work fairly heavily with Facebook's Graph API, and I think they may have employed too many Boeing engineers for the part swaps lately.

tonymet 2y ago
Most of the compatibility issues over the past few years at least have been due to added privacy restrictions and reduced permissions scoping.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  The same few years have seen the developer bug tool closed down in favor of the mostly abandoned “community forums” no one uses. We had big multi-year bugs in “assigned” state before its closure, too.
  - tonymet 2y ago
    That’s true too. The developer api is no longer a major growth generator as it once was. What remains is the bare minimum to keep partners happy, typically ads vendors

fragmede 2y ago

> We called this swapping out the airplane parts mid-flight... At ksplice we swapped the code out from under the kernel without rebooting, so I know what you mean.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago

For curious readers, the "building a plane as it flies" metaphor dates back to at least 2000, to these commercials for EDS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2zqTYgcpfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2zqTYgcpfg I thought it was IBM but I was quite mistaken, so good thing I looked it up lol