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Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

engineering.fb.com

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Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#4
post #2

The internal tools at Meta are incredible tbh. There’s an ecosystem of well-designed internal tools that talk to each other. That was my favorite part of working there.

Polar opposite of my experience. To achieve the technical equivalent of changing a lightbulb, spend the entire day wrangling a dozen tools which are broken in different ways, maintained by teams that no longer exist or have completely rolled over, only to arrive at the finish line and discover we don't use those lightbulbs anymore. Move things and break fast.

Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#6
I kind of love Meta for all the seemingly unnecessary internal stuff they do. They have so many projects that are absolutely not critical for them, maybe not even net positive, but they spend who knows how many hours building and maintaining them.

Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#7
post #6

I kind of love Meta for all the seemingly unnecessary internal stuff they do. They have so many projects that are absolutely not critical for them, maybe not even net positive, but they spend who knows how many hours building and maintaining them.

> Meta for all the seemingly unnecessary internal stuff they do.

Netflix would like to have a word.

Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#8
post #2

The internal tools at Meta are incredible tbh. There’s an ecosystem of well-designed internal tools that talk to each other. That was my favorite part of working there.

Polar opposite of my experience. To achieve the technical equivalent of changing a lightbulb, spend the entire day wrangling a dozen tools which are broken in different ways, maintained by teams that no longer exist or have completely rolled over, only to arrive at the finish line and discover we don't use those lightbulbs anymore. Move things and break fast.

Yeah 100%. I found it immensely frustrating to be using tools with no community (except internally), so-so documentation, and features that were clearly broken in a way that would be unacceptable for a regular consumer product. If you have a question or error not covered by an internal search or documentation, good luck, you'll need it. Literally part of the reason I left the company.

Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polar opposite of my experience. To achieve the technical equivalent of changing a lightbulb, spend the entire day wrangling a dozen tools which are broken in different ways, maintained by teams that no longer exist or have completely rolled over, only to arrive at the finish line and discover we don't use those lightbulbs anymore. Move things and break fast.

Yeah 100%. I found it immensely frustrating to be using tools with no community (except internally), so-so documentation, and features that were clearly broken in a way that would be unacceptable for a regular consumer product. If you have a question or error not covered by an internal search or documentation, good luck, you'll need it. Literally part of the reason I left the company.

Agreed. I often get my work done using open source build instructions and tools and then when everything works I port it to internal infra. Other people are the opposite though, which for open source based code bases has a nasty side effect of the work having no upstream able tests!

Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#10
post #3

Can this be downloaded somewhere? Couldn't find any link in the open source site: https://opensource.fb.com/ nor the ELI5: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2021/09/20/eli5-be...

TBH the value of bento over other notebook offerings was almost entirely how well it plays with the rest of the data and infra stack within facebook. It was super easy to go from raw data (entire DE and DI orgs responsible for ETL and cluster maintenance) to a cleaned up table (usually built by DEs) to an ad hoc table to support a specific use-case that could then be accessed via bento, analyzed, and then published / shared to anyone in the company.
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