Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

Post by soedirgo » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

kick wrote: post #68

raphaelj wrote: post #19

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…

The problem there is that '10k+' "engineers" are trying to make the same 'photo, video, post and message-sharing website'. It's a structural problem and little more: the website (and app) is their main money-maker, so they're going to give it a disproportionate amount of resources. Imagine you hire ten thousand people to lay one railroad track. [note; see end of post] If any single one of them doesn't contribute dire…

Post by seph-reed » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #39

raphaelj wrote: post #19

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.

    .App {
      .Topbar {
        .Logo { color: green }
      }
      .Content {
        h2 { color: orange; }
      }
    }

Post by kick » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

soedirgo wrote: post #242

kick wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem there is that '10k+' "engineers" are trying to make the same 'photo, video, post and message-sharing website'. It's a structural problem and little more: the website (and app) is their main money-maker, so they're going to give it a disproportionate amount of resources. Imagine you hire ten thousand people to lay one railroad track. [note; see end of post] If any single one of them doesn't contribute dire…

I don't know how many people FB actually allocates for their main app, but this reminds me of a chapter in The Mythical Man-Month. It is said over 1000 people and 5000 man-years went into OS/360. I don't see it anywhere today. Instead, the book proposes The Surgical Team, i.e. about 10 people taking specialized roles, with the system being the product of the mind of a few key people. I wonder how well this aged.

Post by the_other » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

5cott0 wrote: post #199

the_other wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not. HoCs don’t add nesting. If they do, you’re doing it wrong. React <15 (2yrs old), did nudge you in the direction of div-itis, because all components that rendered something had to render a single root element. The more recent versions did away with that constraint. HoCs don’t even need to return markup; they’re functions which return functions. The general expectation should be that an HoC behaves like a fac…

So every React app can be effortlessly refactored to use whatever shiny new latest and greatest architecture abstraction React comes up with?

Post by swyx » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

jariel wrote: post #8

Everything is in the past tense without dates. When was this massive re-write? 2010? 2018?