This didn't really tell me why Facebook needs 400 people to work on the iOS app and 75 commits per hour.
iOS at Facebook [pdf]
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Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]
#12It seems like with such a strong engineering team, Facebook should have really built their own phone. It's impressive that they re-wrote a lot of the major components the iOS development process and optimized them for their scale. I think a Facebook style development platform on it's own hardware would be an interesting contrast to Google's and Apple's solutions. One challenge with learning this type of development s…
> It seems like with such a strong engineering team, Facebook should have really built their own phone.
They actually tried not too long ago... [0]
[0] http://www.cnet.com/news/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-floppe...
Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]
#13So, FB app is bloated because they choose to be sloppy is what I read. Wonder how sustainable this is over the long term?
This strategy was hugely successful for Microsoft since the early days of Windows NT 3.1: “What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.” The performance advancements on the hardware side of the platform are almost entirely consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the most popular app on the software side.
That may be successful for the software companies. But pity the user who's stuck with old hardware and wants to know why used computers don't last as long as used cars. Maybe when Moore's Law finally becomes invalid...
Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]
#14So, FB app is bloated because they choose to be sloppy is what I read. Wonder how sustainable this is over the long term?
Sloppy?! Those guys have needs the majority of us will never need to deal with. Did you read the presentation? If anything they're the opposite of sloppy.
The parent is not referring to those needs (which are legitimate). The presentation talks a lot about the hacking culture; how there is a lot of duplicate code, a lot of dead code, a lot of "temporary" code.
We call these things technical debt. But it sounds like they just never fix them. Refactors never happen.
Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]
#15Some sidenotes: I'm surprised to see so many custom libraries for Paper, an app which I had forgotten about. And another reminder that a lot of companies at scale are choosing mercurial over git.
Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]
#16Very interesting, even as a fan of native apps I can see the thought process behind doing it web based when you have to build so many tools for each platform.
Except it's mostly not web based.
Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]
#17So, FB app is bloated because they choose to be sloppy is what I read. Wonder how sustainable this is over the long term?
Sloppy?! Those guys have needs the majority of us will never need to deal with. Did you read the presentation? If anything they're the opposite of sloppy.
If the were not sloppy they wouldn't have to deal with those needs too.
Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]
#18This didn't really tell me why Facebook needs 400 people to work on the iOS app and 75 commits per hour.
Surely most of these commits are either automated, or similar in nature (i.e., adding some static resources to some file).
Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]
#19tl;dr Software engineering at extreme edge cases of performance and scalability can look very different than your typical use cases. Don't do this at home (until you have to). Interesting none-the-less.
Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]
#20It seems like with such a strong engineering team, Facebook should have really built their own phone. It's impressive that they re-wrote a lot of the major components the iOS development process and optimized them for their scale. I think a Facebook style development platform on it's own hardware would be an interesting contrast to Google's and Apple's solutions. One challenge with learning this type of development s…
I'd say Facebook's emphasis on developer tools shows they'd be more committed to go down the route of building custom hardware for their devs like mouses, keyboards, laptops, workstations, etc. As opposed to building hardware for end-users.