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Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

engineering.fb.com

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Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#61

Post by ipsum2 »

grantsucceeded wrote: post #53
ipsum2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Zeus is a fork of Zookeeper, Hack is a fork of PHP, etc. It's usually needed to make it work with the internal environment. The few things that don't have forks are usually the open source projects like React or PyTorch, but even those have some custom features added to make it work with FB internals.

Few companies experienced the explosive growth fb did, though many will claim to have done so. Hack made the existing codebase of php scale to insane levels while reaching escape velocity for the overall company to even attempt to transition away or shrink the php codebase, as i recall (i was an SRE, not a dev) zeus likewise.

You worked at FB, but you call yourself an SRE, not a PE? ;)

Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#62

Post by fragmede »

ipsum2 wrote: post #61
grantsucceeded wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few companies experienced the explosive growth fb did, though many will claim to have done so. Hack made the existing codebase of php scale to insane levels while reaching escape velocity for the overall company to even attempt to transition away or shrink the php codebase, as i recall (i was an SRE, not a dev) zeus likewise.

You worked at FB, but you call yourself an SRE, not a PE? ;)

You still call it Facebook?

Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#63

Post by bozhark »

Random_BSD_Geek wrote: post #4
web3aj wrote: 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.

Move Smooth and Fix Things (tm) is our nonprofit corporation’s version of this atrocious motto.

Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#64

Post by bbor »

sk11001 wrote: 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.

Internal startups have the same value proposition as external ones, I think; most fail, but every once in a while you hit a React or a Gmail.

Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#65

Post by LarsDu88 »

tqi wrote: post #28
JohnMakin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the crazier things a L4 meta colleague of mine told me, that I still don’t believe entirely, is that meta pretty much has their own fork of everything , even tools like git. is this true?

Facebook actually doesn't use git, they use mercurial ( https://graphite.dev/blog/why-facebook-doesnt-use-git ). That decision is also illustrative of why they end up forking most things - Facebook's usage patterns at the far extreme end for almost any tool, and things thats are non-issues with fewer engineers or a smaller codebase become complete blockers.

They use sapling. An in-house clone of mercurial that was open sourced 2 years ago

Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#67

Post by lacker »

zhengyi13 wrote: post #57
gcr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also how things work at Google. Google also maintains a monorepo with "forks" of all software that they use. History diverges, but is occasionally synchronized for things like security updates etc.

Am I completely off-base/confused thinking that the GFE originally started life (like back under csilver) as a fork of boa[0]? [0]: http://www.boa.org/

I thought it was GWS that originally started as a fork of boa.

Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#68

Post by moandcompany »

landedgentry wrote: post #51
extr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, you're supposed to read the code and figure it out. And if you can't, you're not good enough an engineer. According to people at Meta.

Same as Google. Many internal tools have painful interfaces and poor or documentation because the hiring bar was high and it was acceptable to assume that the user's skill level is high enough to figure it out. That attitude becomes a bigger problem when trying to sell tools to the public (e.g. Google Cloud Platform).

Re: Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

#69

Post by yodsanklai »

moandcompany wrote: post #68
landedgentry wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you're supposed to read the code and figure it out. And if you can't, you're not good enough an engineer. According to people at Meta.

Same as Google. Many internal tools have painful interfaces and poor or documentation because the hiring bar was high and it was acceptable to assume that the user's skill level is high enough to figure it out. That attitude becomes a bigger problem when trying to sell tools to the public (e.g. Google Cloud Platform).

As an outsider, I was always under the impression that Google had a tradition of engineering excellence (robust tools, clean and while tested code following strict guidelines), while Meta has more of a Hacker culture (move fast and break things).
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