nbm

13 ms·

61.
by nbm 10y ago
Imagine you have a news web site with decades of news articles. You add a new article, which changes the "Top articles" section on a side bar. With a static generator, you would need to rebuild every single article, which may ta
62.
by nbm 10y ago
There's a weird power imbalance in these situations. The person reporting the problem is able to tell whatever story they want since they generally don't have a reputation to maintain (and will, if anything, likely improve their
63.
by nbm 10y ago
Google+ launched in 2011. Friend lists were on Facebook in 2009: http://mashable.com/2009/10/09/create-facebook-friend-lists/
64.
by nbm 10y ago
Intimidation, threat of harm, and incitement are generally illegal whether they're on the Internet, in a letter, or delivered in person.
65.
by nbm 10y ago
The underlying problem is the use of a naive cache buster which would cause the old server to reply one way and the new one another. For both the people who want the old asset and the new asset. If instead of being something the web server
66.
by nbm 10y ago
Configuration is perhaps more complicated than binary deployment. With binary deployment, you can end up with, say, only the version in production, and then version that is about to be in production - the "old" and then "new
67.
by nbm 10y ago
As long as you're not in the spacefaring, automotive, banking/insurance, and medical industries, it's probably the case that it's acceptable to have some downtime and bugs - nobody will die or have their livelihood destr
68.
by nbm 10y ago
This class of errors is sometimes fairly easy to catch with canaries. If a button is obscured or inactive/non-functional for some reason, then chances are some metric is going to be statistically varied enough to call out while in the
69.
by nbm 10y ago
It's an internal project. It basically takes a "diff" from Phabricator, and goes through the process of applying it to master and ensuring that all unit and integration tests pass before committing it. This removes the need
70.
by nbm 10y ago
I'm not sure about Instagram, but Facebook is a fan of rebasing in general. Nothing should ever appear as a commit in master that isn't something that should be used in production - ie, should never intentionally be broken in iso
71.
by nbm 10y ago
Can you give an example? Your question seems too abstract for me to see if I have any experience with what you're talking about.
72.
by nbm 10y ago
This is actually a problem whether you're using continuous deployment or not. You need to put a release out, which you have done some testing for, but you know that only real production traffic can shake out certain types of problems.
73.
by nbm 10y ago
Assuming they're spread out over ~10-12 hours (some crazy morning people, some crazy nocturnal people), that's only ~4-6 commits per hour. Most problems will be discovered by someone and reported in an hour, and most of those will
74.
by nbm 10y ago
As mentioned in the article itself, Instagram uses code review (using Phabricator), and also uses automated continuous integration for running tests on each "diff", before it allows the change to be landed to master.
75.
by nbm 10y ago
Beyond a certain size (basically, once the time the migration will take because of the size of the data it applies to is too large), migrations are a heavy investment - in elapsed time, I/O, and so forth. As such, they are planned to
76.
Continuous Deployment at Instagram(engineering.instagram.com)
239 points by nbm 10y ago|91 comments
77.
The Evolution of Advanced Caching in the Facebook CDN(research.facebook.com)
2 points by nbm 11y ago|0 comments
78.
by nbm 11y ago
My experience is that interesting things happen to organisations at size 20-30 (basically when the CEO and/or COO can no longer keep tabs on nearly everything themselves, no longer can maintain some relationship with all staff), and al
79.
by nbm 11y ago
This may sound weird, but you were probably the one with motivation problems in this scenario, not them. Don't believe me? They're comfortable and secure. They're happy with their output. They're apparently paid well.
80.
by nbm 11y ago
It does depend on the contributors, and obviously depends on the culture of the company (ie, if everyone assumes managers are supposed to do it, nobody will do it). You can't rely on any random grouping of people to decide well on what
81.
by nbm 11y ago
Absolutely. There are many other ways people end up unmotivated, but the most common I've seen has to do with things that are within the realm of their manager - possibly with escalation to someone higher up. I've encountered onl
82.
by nbm 11y ago
I've been on the receiving side of "no ability to promote", and ultimately the best thing a manager can do in that situation is to have an honest conversation about what is and isn't possible. In addition, don't jus
83.
by nbm 11y ago
I've found that groups of individual contributors are actually very good on deciding what is important, what they should work on and when, and how to work together to get things done. Managers can provide a useful role in setting the s
84.
by nbm 11y ago
If one considers the primary purpose of managers to be to improve the performance of those that report to them, then this list starts poorly. It _is_ terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people, but most people only end up unmotivated b
85.
by nbm 11y ago
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/... was a springboard for many people dealing with this problem. That whole site is worth a read if you're interested in game development at all.
86.
by nbm 11y ago
The referenced video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLEawo6OzFM ) is a great introduction to Facebook's datacenter fabric as deployed in Altoona.
87.
by nbm 12y ago
FWIW, Sheryl Sandberg also leaves work at 5:30pm to spend time with her kids - strange that something she's been talking about for some time (before Bret left Facebook, even) isn't mentioned. The Facebook hackathons used to start
88.
by nbm 12y ago
Okay, if we're only considering active health checks, then I'm not sure any load balancer considers a 5xx a success by default, let alone a "production" load balancer. For a non-healthcheck 5xx response, it almost never
89.
by nbm 12y ago
5xx may be the correct response - sometimes the server is asked to do something valid (ie, not a 4xx/client screwed up), but had an error when it tried it. No load balancer I know of will remove a web server that returns a single 5xx f
90.
by nbm 12y ago
Pretty much all load balancers have health checks - active where they reach out to each server, or passive where they observe the responses of existing requests if they can. One of the issues is making your active health check more like a d

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