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Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

engineering.fb.com

31–40 of 489 posts

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#31
post #2

It looks a lot like the new Twitter. I guess the new trend is just to show multiple tabs from the mobile app at once as the desktop site.

I don’t get the hate for the new Twitter, to be honest. It loads fast, is simple, it’s to the point.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#32

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

Agree whole heartedly, Facebook is a disgrace of a website and has been for years. Crazy how slow it is to load.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#34

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

Comments like these remind of an old post on Slashdot, "What makes a good website?" Ask "geeks" what they prefer, it's usually minimalism, no images, consistent text styling. In the end, the ideal format becomes a text file without markup. I think we need to accept the opinions of techies are increasingly irrelevant in tech. It's like being fine artist getting paid to design flyers or a chef making burgers.

Wrong. The average user does not give a shit if the page is rendered server-side, or of it's a SPA.

Geeks prefer speed, like everyone. There are plenty of papers that show that a reduction in latency improves the conversion rate. And it's does not have to be ugly to be fast.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#35

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

It is not a failure of the profession. There are engineering teams out there that excel at software performance. Granted they may not have billions of users. It is a matter of mindset and core values and those are hard to change.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#36
post #4

This is 100% incidental complexity. It's painful to consider that this level of sophisticated engineering is needed to render a website quickly in 2020. What went wrong? I'm personally excited about things like turbolinks and phoenix liveview, which may provide a path out of this mess.

The frontier of web design is apparently digital Rube Goldberg machines, existing probably more for job security rather than consideration for the end-user.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#37

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

Comments like these remind of an old post on Slashdot, "What makes a good website?" Ask "geeks" what they prefer, it's usually minimalism, no images, consistent text styling. In the end, the ideal format becomes a text file without markup. I think we need to accept the opinions of techies are increasingly irrelevant in tech. It's like being fine artist getting paid to design flyers or a chef making burgers.

Geeks prefer function over form

Consumers (apparently) prefer form over function (or at least, they are more easily fooled into thinking the more form, the more function)

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#38

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

Comments like these remind of an old post on Slashdot, "What makes a good website?" Ask "geeks" what they prefer, it's usually minimalism, no images, consistent text styling. In the end, the ideal format becomes a text file without markup. I think we need to accept the opinions of techies are increasingly irrelevant in tech. It's like being fine artist getting paid to design flyers or a chef making burgers.

Performance need not be coupled to idea of minimalist design. A performant website can still look like Facebook and not take 5000 ms to load.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#39

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

Sorry, I won’t take blame for that.

Still haven’t found a use case for React/Angular or SASS/whatever.

If I’m guilty of something is not recognizing the validity of those tools, as I’m sure there are.

But 2MB CSS is simply inconceivable to me.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#40

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

I guess they probably could build a nice and fast website if it was up to them. But there's probably a lot more requirements than just that.

Things like https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480... are probably not decided on and implemented by the engineering team but are coming down as a requirement from the top. This is probably the case for a lot of other decisions that slow down the page ("We need this A/B test framework", "this needs to be hidden to increase retention",...)

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