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I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

ryanwaggoner.com

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Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#51

Post by jsankey »

seancron wrote: post #44

In case anyone didn't see it down at the bottom, this comment was left on the post: Ryan (& Everyone Else) – My name is Mike Vernal, and I manage the engineering team for Facebook Platform. I understand and am legitimately sorry for the frustration you guys are experiencing. I think there were three themes in this post — frequency of change, bugs, and documentation. I wanted to give you some more context on all three…

we actually copy verified bugs from Bugzilla into an internal bug tracking system, and we then use that internal bug tracking system to drive bugs to resolution

What an utter waste of effort! For more time spent doing grunt work, you give slower and less complete feedback to your customers (platform developers in this case). There may be some information they don't want in a public tracker, but I'm betting it's:

- a lot less information than they think; and - much easier to manage in a different way, as opposed to maintaining two bug databases!

Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#52

Post by jsankey »

ojbyrne wrote: post #9

I think they do this on purpose - rapidly changing apis, and having poor or overly verbose documentation is a way to weed out all but the largest development companies, thereby reducing support costs, and allowing partnerships with the big companies that survive. It's right from microsoft's playbook.

You think "rapidly changing apis" is "right from microsoft's playbook"? Microsoft has been known to abandon a platform (VB6 being the prime example), but they have also put tremendous effort into preserving compatibility in their APIs. So while they may have introduced new APIs over time, they've also shouldered the massive burden of keeping the old way working for many years. I would even say they realised this was a vital component in maintaining their dominance: the sheer number of applications that work on Windows.

Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#53

Post by kd0amg »

ntoshev wrote: post #28
natch wrote: post #20

Their iPhone Facebook Connect documentation is beyond atrocious. What little there is was written by someone who, besides not being a non-native English speaker, also does not care about getting things right. Several people have mentioned how bad the documentation is, but nobody has provided examples. In case anyone from Facebook (or "facebook" as it's sometimes called in the docs) reads this and cares, I'm putting s…

This is just spelling / grammar, I have no problems with these errors, especially when the main documentation is wiki-based (this may be because I'm not a native speaker). In my limited experience with Facebook docs before the Open Graph API, I haven't seen factual errors, but there are a lot of omissions. Open Graph API seems very clean and it also seems like it doesn't need much documentation... if the API calls ac…

This is just spelling / grammar

Some syntactic errors are so egregious as to obscure, change, or remove the meaning of a sentence.

Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#54

Post by kragen »

douglasp wrote: post #36

I agree with most of the comments here and on the blog post; having hit many of the same issues myself. Fortunately, I get to do something about it. I work for Facebook (joined ~3 weeks ago). Part of my job is to help fix the developer site, documentation, etc. (along with a host of other issues related to developer relations). We are working on updating the site and docs as fast as we can and this thread is helpful.…

When are you going to put the Wiki back online? That should be a matter of a few man-hours of work. Until then, it's not believable to claim "We're working on updating the site and docs as fast as we can."

In my experience developing a couple of FB apps in the past, the information in the Wiki was absolutely crucial. (I'm talking about the Wiki that was located at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/ in the past.)

Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#55

Post by kragen »

ntoshev wrote: post #4

This is Bret Taylor's Graph API - the concept simplified the API a lot, and companies like Freebase copied it for their own data. Too bad it is not working...

Many of Ryan's complaints apply both to the graph API and to the older APIs, although one of them is that the graph API isn't maintained properly (which has been the case since the beginning).

Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#57

Post by MartinCron »

sofuture wrote: post #39

The docs are horrible and often contradictory -- but with enough trial and error most things can be figured out. The unannounced breaking changes are absolutely inexcusable and screw the people using your platform . It is not a sustainable development plan, you will eventually alienate 'the next Zynga' and all the smaller developers. Please, please, please put some effort into API stability.

you will eventually alienate 'the next Zynga'

One can only hope.

Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#58

Post by rwhitman »

seancron wrote: post #44

In case anyone didn't see it down at the bottom, this comment was left on the post: Ryan (& Everyone Else) – My name is Mike Vernal, and I manage the engineering team for Facebook Platform. I understand and am legitimately sorry for the frustration you guys are experiencing. I think there were three themes in this post — frequency of change, bugs, and documentation. I wanted to give you some more context on all three…

Its great that they're trying to simplify it and use standards, its not so great that the way they've been getting there is to simply switch old things off without notice and not document or adequately announce the new ways of doing things before they launch.

Honestly, I get it but the damage has been done. The hype window surrounding the facebook platform has passed and their developer outreach effort is too little too late.

Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#59

Post by hello_moto »

I'm actually quite surprised that HN-ers are complaining about Facebook API, documentation, and quality assurance process. Isn't Facebook the kind of companies where most HN-ers fall in love with?

1) Young founder with visions

2) Hacking culture (to the max)

3) Cool technology (Erlang, C++, Java, Hadoop, HBase)

Every time I saw a Facebook engineer giving a talk or writing a blog, the word "quality" (unit test, test, automation, manual, or whatever) and "documentation" are nowhere to be found.

It's not in the company's blood/gene when it comes to QA process. Maybe that's the reason why they're hiring super smart and super young individuals? to pull all-nighters fixing bugs and pray during the release day?

It'll be super hard to get better in QA because it's probably too late for them: too many hot-shot developers who aren't used to testing (automated or manual). They'll probably hire tons QA and automation engineers, but at the end of the day, their developers will "fix" bugs and throw it over the wall.

Some people might not like the way Google works (too much bureaucracy in terms of code quality), but they work really hard to make sure their engineers are responsible toward the code they produce. It's hard to have that kind of mentality embedded onto your engineers.

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