3 ms·

It's hard for me to give appreciation but while Google have traditionally been tech leaders in web technologies: Facebook are doing really awesome stuff lately.

by inglor 12y ago

It's hard for me to give appreciation but while Google have traditionally been tech leaders in web technologies: Facebook are doing really awesome stuff lately. It's not just React and this - it's also FLUX, HHVM, Hack, Haxl (Their Haskell libraries), contributing to writing a spec for PHP and other ventures. I'm interested in who is the driving force behind this open source change in Facebook, I don't recall facebook in behaving these way 4 years ago. Can anyone find anything on a policy change that happened? They really turned around.

kmavm 12y ago
Thanks for the kind words. For context, I'm an HHVM alum who has been at Facebook for almost six years now (wow time flies). From my point of view, most of what has changed is resources and the immediacy of our survival-level concerns. Four years ago Google had declared nuclear war on us, we had far fewer users, we were not profitable, there were constant fires to put out with basic production operations stuff we've gotten better at, and we were enormously more under-staffed. I was working on HHVM already, but it was in a million little pieces spread across Drew's, Jason's, and my desks. The tools we're open sourcing over the last two years mostly did not yet exist, and if they existed, it was in some primordial form. We also have gotten much, much better imho at being good stewards of our open source projects; HHVM's predecessor system, the HipHop compiler, was also open source, but we people were spread way too thin to be able to respond to bug reports, pull requests, get FB's latest code into public hands, build binary packages for popular distros, etc. on a timely basis. Huge props are due to all of the technical people on our open source teams.
- inglor 12y ago
  Thanks for answering, it's always good to get answers straight from the source. It would be awesome if you blogged about this. It would be interesting to read _how_ you got better at being good stewards of your open source projects and what made you open source these. I think it's a challenge a lot of people face.
  - jamesgpearce 12y ago
    This presentation at OSCON 2014 runs through some of the things we've tightened up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk
- girvo 12y ago
  Thank you, so very very much, for HHVM. Between HHVM, Hack, and now Flow, I can write software using the languages I use most often but gain the benefits of better tooling.
digi_owl 12y ago
Their "cold storage" system for using optical media to store data long term seemed interesting.
nbm 12y ago
As kmavm said, thanks for saying so on behalf of the people who have been working on open sourcing things (I haven't as yet). I don't think there's been any policy changes. I think the policy has always been that we're open to open sourcing stuff, so long as it is useful to others (ie, not just a code drop that nobody can use) and someone signs up for the work and there isn't something important that's being dropped in the process. The difference I think is people, energy, and momentum. We've been able to find people (many already at the company) genuinely interested in some of the less glamorous parts of building a scalable program to open source things - things like sync processes and pull request management and UIs for ACLs and CLAs and so forth. We've had people who, often due to the availability of these tools, have developed an internal energy to want to put in the extra effort to make their project ready to be open sourced (like making sure all dependencies are available already, or scoping out or stubbing out things that are Facebook-specific (our asset management flow, for example) while still keeping the software useful, and so forth. The momentum has also made the idea of open sourcing code more top-of-mind to people, which helps to get people to rewrite their changes to accommodate a nascent open sourcing effort on a piece of code, or to get more discretionary time to investigate or work on making something open source. Or even just moral support from your team and colleagues.
- eric_bullington 12y ago
  Well, regardless of root cause, you all are racking up some amazing open source accomplishments. Big props to everyone working on open source at Facebook. And I think these efforts will pay off in spades for Facebook, in terms of attracting top talent and in terms of the expertise that results from having the some of the best dev tools available being developed in-house.
azakai 12y ago
> I'm interested in who is the driving force behind this open source change in Facebook, I don't recall facebook in behaving these way 4 years ago. [..] Can anyone find anything on a policy change that happened? They really turned around. My guess is that Facebook was just much smaller 4 years ago, over that period its staff grew very quickly. And even today it has an order of magnitude less employees than say Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Larger, more established companies have more opportunity to open source things on this scale.
glifchits 12y ago
Facebook has been doing a great job with marketing their open source projects. It seems like every Facebook OSS project has a strong logo, beautiful landing page with good documentation, a distinct group of project champions within the company (with embedded recordings of their conference talks on the project site), mailing lists, IRC channels, and the projects are often exceedingly applicable to a large proportion of real world software projects. Not to say that Google's OSS hasn't done much of the same, but AFAIK many of their projects fail on at least a couple of these points.

by inglor 12y ago

kmavm 12y ago

Thanks for the kind words. For context, I'm an HHVM alum who has been at Facebook for almost six years now (wow time flies). From my point of view, most of what has changed is resources and the immediacy of our survival-level concerns. Four years ago Google had declared nuclear war on us, we had far fewer users, we were not profitable, there were constant fires to put out with basic production operations stuff we've gotten better at, and we were enormously more under-staffed. I was working on HHVM already, but it was in a million little pieces spread across Drew's, Jason's, and my desks. The tools we're open sourcing over the last two years mostly did not yet exist, and if they existed, it was in some primordial form. We also have gotten much, much better imho at being good stewards of our open source projects; HHVM's predecessor system, the HipHop compiler, was also open source, but we people were spread way too thin to be able to respond to bug reports, pull requests, get FB's latest code into public hands, build binary packages for popular distros, etc. on a timely basis. Huge props are due to all of the technical people on our open source teams.

inglor 12y ago
Thanks for answering, it's always good to get answers straight from the source. It would be awesome if you blogged about this. It would be interesting to read _how_ you got better at being good stewards of your open source projects and what made you open source these. I think it's a challenge a lot of people face.
- jamesgpearce 12y ago
  This presentation at OSCON 2014 runs through some of the things we've tightened up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk
girvo 12y ago
Thank you, so very very much, for HHVM. Between HHVM, Hack, and now Flow, I can write software using the languages I use most often but gain the benefits of better tooling.

digi_owl 12y ago

Their "cold storage" system for using optical media to store data long term seemed interesting.

nbm 12y ago

As kmavm said, thanks for saying so on behalf of the people who have been working on open sourcing things (I haven't as yet). I don't think there's been any policy changes. I think the policy has always been that we're open to open sourcing stuff, so long as it is useful to others (ie, not just a code drop that nobody can use) and someone signs up for the work and there isn't something important that's being dropped in the process. The difference I think is people, energy, and momentum. We've been able to find people (many already at the company) genuinely interested in some of the less glamorous parts of building a scalable program to open source things - things like sync processes and pull request management and UIs for ACLs and CLAs and so forth. We've had people who, often due to the availability of these tools, have developed an internal energy to want to put in the extra effort to make their project ready to be open sourced (like making sure all dependencies are available already, or scoping out or stubbing out things that are Facebook-specific (our asset management flow, for example) while still keeping the software useful, and so forth. The momentum has also made the idea of open sourcing code more top-of-mind to people, which helps to get people to rewrite their changes to accommodate a nascent open sourcing effort on a piece of code, or to get more discretionary time to investigate or work on making something open source. Or even just moral support from your team and colleagues.

eric_bullington 12y ago
Well, regardless of root cause, you all are racking up some amazing open source accomplishments. Big props to everyone working on open source at Facebook. And I think these efforts will pay off in spades for Facebook, in terms of attracting top talent and in terms of the expertise that results from having the some of the best dev tools available being developed in-house.

azakai 12y ago

> I'm interested in who is the driving force behind this open source change in Facebook, I don't recall facebook in behaving these way 4 years ago. [..] Can anyone find anything on a policy change that happened? They really turned around. My guess is that Facebook was just much smaller 4 years ago, over that period its staff grew very quickly. And even today it has an order of magnitude less employees than say Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Larger, more established companies have more opportunity to open source things on this scale.

glifchits 12y ago

Facebook has been doing a great job with marketing their open source projects. It seems like every Facebook OSS project has a strong logo, beautiful landing page with good documentation, a distinct group of project champions within the company (with embedded recordings of their conference talks on the project site), mailing lists, IRC channels, and the projects are often exceedingly applicable to a large proportion of real world software projects. Not to say that Google's OSS hasn't done much of the same, but AFAIK many of their projects fail on at least a couple of these points.