iOS at Facebook [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#21

Post by onewaystreet » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 2:06 PM UTC

micampe wrote: post #11

This didn't really tell me why Facebook needs 400 people to work on the iOS app and 75 commits per hour.

Facebook doesn't have a dedicated iOS team, rather each product team (feed, photos, search, messages, etc.) commits code to the app. This allows updates to be made faster and more consistent since there aren't multiple product teams for each product for each platform, but it also leads to having a large number of contributors, commits and duplicate code.

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#22

Post by cableshaft » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 2:07 PM UTC

This was pretty interesting. It would have never occurred to me that XCode, Git, etc. couldn't handle as much as you throw at it, but it kind of makes sense how they explain it here. Still, I don't think I would like to actually work in that environment where the codebase changed so much so often and had so much dead and redundant code, so I guess I'm glad my interview with them didn't go terribly well (got asked questions by non tech-type person who was looking for keywords to obscure concepts as answers and didn't understand my conceptual but keyword-less responses).

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#23

Post by L-four » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 2:08 PM UTC

rimantas wrote: post #17

phn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because they wouldn't exist.

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#24

Post by buffoon » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 2:13 PM UTC

"Done is better than perfect"

"Move fast and break things"

I'm glad they're not holding any critical data like our personal information, what we do, what we think and where we are then!

If this set of slides embodies 'hacker culture' which it claims to, I am not a hacker, neither are my colleagues and I'm proud of that.

The whole thing stinks of arrogance hiding incompetence. I'm not putting anything near facebook, ever.

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#25

Post by vinceyuan » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 2:17 PM UTC

This post is very interesting. News reported Facebook would create a simplified Android app for low end phone owners in Africa. I think They should do it for iOS too.

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#26

Post by rabino » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 2:18 PM UTC

The unnecessary bashing of PHP, the lame justification for a sloppy architecture, the immense ego... I don't think hack culture should be used to justify asshole-ery.

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#27

Post by untog » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 2:19 PM UTC

vinceyuan wrote: post #25

This post is very interesting. News reported Facebook would create a simplified Android app for low end phone owners in Africa. I think They should do it for iOS too.

They already have, it's called Facebook Lite. You can't get it from the Play Store in the US, but I download an APK. It's nice.

I only really downloaded it so that I could get notifications, and now m.facebook.com can send them from Chrome, so I'm very happy to totally app-less.

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#28

Post by manmal » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 2:21 PM UTC

cableshaft wrote: post #22

This was pretty interesting. It would have never occurred to me that XCode, Git, etc. couldn't handle as much as you throw at it, but it kind of makes sense how they explain it here. Still, I don't think I would like to actually work in that environment where the codebase changed so much so often and had so much dead and redundant code, so I guess I'm glad my interview with them didn't go terribly well (got asked que…

I've worked with clients that had all their code in one repo at Github, and it took me 5 tries to even pull it down initially. You need not operate at Facebook scale to overwhelm git :)

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#29

Post by Synaesthesia » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 2:21 PM UTC

miguelrochefort wrote: post #16

JamesBaxter wrote: post #9

Very 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.

Yes interestly enough there was a period when the front-end for mobile was html5 based but they since ditched that for greater (native) performance, in fact as this article reveals, a number of implementations!

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#30

Post by asdfqwe1 » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 2:21 PM UTC

buffoon wrote: post #24

"Done is better than perfect" "Move fast and break things" I'm glad they're not holding any critical data like our personal information, what we do, what we think and where we are then! If this set of slides embodies 'hacker culture' which it claims to, I am not a hacker, neither are my colleagues and I'm proud of that. The whole thing stinks of arrogance hiding incompetence. I'm not putting anything near facebook, e…

To be fair, most of these specific signs have been removed now/changed (I was an intern there fall 2013). They actually talked about how that used to be a slogan, but breaking stuff isn't really acceptable anymore because facebook is so big. They still wanted us to move really fast though...