Antimatter15 has a pretty cool clock style visualization of this from 2012 [1]
Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake
71–80 of 200 posts
Re: Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake
#72> If you reload the page you’ll see approximately fifty-bajillion network requests go off as Facebook desperately tries to load all the junk that it needs to display facebook.com. I like this part. As a developer I've often looked at the network usage of large websites / web applications and it's always surprising to me just how...unoptimized it is as far as network connections go. I mean Facebook loads decently enou…
> I like this part. As a developer I've often looked at the network usage of large websites / web applications and it's always surprising to me just how...unoptimized it is as far as network connections go. Have you considered that your opinion on the best way to serve data to a billion users might actually be wrong? That maybe Facebook actually knows what they are doing?
> Have you considered that your opinion on the best way to serve data to a billion users might actually be wrong? That maybe Facebook actually knows what they are doing?
Certainly! But I've also done work where Humvees in the middle of Iraq use satellite internet connectivity with massive latency and the more connections it has to open to get started the slower everything gets.
Perhaps this is an advantage where latency is low so you can load parts of the page faster but I'd love to know some of the more technical reasons behind this!
Re: Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's striking about this writing style is that (as a junior dev) it's a lot easier to understand what he's doing. By sticking to jokes and a simple style, I never felt confused or lost in lingo.
I was thinking at the same thing today reading some tutorial. You have these serious ass tutorials that are an horror to read. And then you have these gems, these very informal tutorials with jokes and slangs and ... and reading them is a pleasure. I guess if you're a serious company like Apple, you can't really have that kind of tutorial for iOS dev. But that would really help.
> I guess if you're a serious company like Apple, you can't really have that kind of tutorial for iOS dev.
The fact that this is true is, to me, a slightly sad reflection on our culture. I understand that too much silliness can get in the way of conveying information, but as you point out, so can too much seriousness.
It's obviously a fine balance, and unfortunately it seems safer to err on the side of seriousness when in doubt. It's one of those things that if you sit down and ask any average individual, they will probably prefer a bit of silliness and an informal style in any situation where it's appropriate, yet somehow collectively we seem to have agreed to default to the opposite, and stick with things being quite dry and serious as a norm.
Interesting, but ultimately a little sad. Why is this the case? Why is our culture this way? Why can't things just be a little more fun by default?
Re: Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake
#74> If you reload the page you’ll see approximately fifty-bajillion network requests go off as Facebook desperately tries to load all the junk that it needs to display facebook.com. I like this part. As a developer I've often looked at the network usage of large websites / web applications and it's always surprising to me just how...unoptimized it is as far as network connections go. I mean Facebook loads decently enou…
Given the age of Facebook and what you're describing, I can only assume that Facebook have just chucked fifty-bajillion interns (one after the other) at the source and told them to add more crap. I mean, isn't that how monolithic apps tend to happen? Someone leaves, new person comes along and adds more to the cruft.
I mean, honestly, that's almost exactly what they said they do with the mobile app and how it contains so many classes / objects that it's really incredibly the app still works.
But I don't know anyone at Facebook so I have no idea how the website is handled.
Re: Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's striking about this writing style is that (as a junior dev) it's a lot easier to understand what he's doing. By sticking to jokes and a simple style, I never felt confused or lost in lingo.
I was thinking at the same thing today reading some tutorial. You have these serious ass tutorials that are an horror to read. And then you have these gems, these very informal tutorials with jokes and slangs and ... and reading them is a pleasure. I guess if you're a serious company like Apple, you can't really have that kind of tutorial for iOS dev. But that would really help.
There's a really fine line there between humour and cringe, though. This article manages it well.
Re: Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I swear by Highcharts. It's big, and paid for commercial use, but you can chart pretty much anything with it, make it look exactly like you want, and it's relatively easy to get started and make nice interactive charts. No affiliation, I just use it for work: http://www.highcharts.com/
HighCharts is awesome. I'm a big fan as well. I've used it for school projects and work before, and was amazed by the documentation and API capabilities. Everything is configurable and easy to figure out.
I'm still not sure how the "Free for Non-Commercial" license interacts with something like the GPL - it seems like I'd have to use BSD in my projects instead if I wanted to use this in open-source stuff.
Edit: it's Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0. I wonder if that stops me running ads on a site that uses it.
Re: Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake
#77Nice work! I really like the idea that the web allows anyone to programmatically dig into the UI and extract data to do things. A friend and I actually made a whole API to interact with FB chat. You should check it out: https://github.com/Schmavery/facebook-chat-api. I'd really love to see what you can come up with, with some of the stuff we support.
Re: Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was thinking at the same thing today reading some tutorial. You have these serious ass tutorials that are an horror to read. And then you have these gems, these very informal tutorials with jokes and slangs and ... and reading them is a pleasure. I guess if you're a serious company like Apple, you can't really have that kind of tutorial for iOS dev. But that would really help.
> I guess if you're a serious company like Apple, you can't really have that kind of tutorial for iOS dev. The fact that this is true is, to me, a slightly sad reflection on our culture. I understand that too much silliness can get in the way of conveying information, but as you point out, so can too much seriousness. It's obviously a fine balance, and unfortunately it seems safer to err on the side of seriousness wh…
I put jokes in my resume. You have to have a bit of restraint, but it can be fun and effective. An oatmeal cookie wouldn't be very good if the whole thing was raisins.
Re: Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake
#79> when it’s midnight and your x-axis formatting function doesn’t convert UNIX times into JavaScript date objects properly because there’s no timezone information and I dunno JavaScript was written by some guy in two weeks (yeah I ain’t afraid to call it out what of it) and your binary-search based conversion of sparse timeseries data into uniformly dense timeseries data is causing so many data points to be graphed that it’s slowly crashing Chrome and you’re watching helplessly as your RAM goes up and Chrome won’t close the tab and it just doesn’t seem right that 2016, the year of the Linux Desktop has brought us this situation I mean I thought if you had enough .js libraries this stuff was meant to just scale right up so tha-
So, did you forget everything you learned about memory management? Or do you think Javascript really doesn't have sound memory management principles? Hell, it's not like you need to retain references to rendered points. Just dequeue them. Browser graphing libraries render to canvas which is just pixels.
Re: Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake
#80This style of writing is so entertaining; it's like a funnier stream of conscious of what goes on in my head when hacking things like this together. If OP is the author, please write more.