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Airbnb Tech Talk: Evan Priestley of Facebook - Move Fast and Break Things

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Airbnb Tech Talk: Evan Priestley of Facebook - Move Fast and Break Things

#1
Move Fast & Break Things A practical set of step-by-step recipes for reproducing some of Facebook's biggest mistakes (in security, web stacks, polytheism, deployment, algorithms, photo faxing and other areas) delivered by an engineer who helped make them.

About Evan Evan Priestley worked as an infrastructure engineer at Facebook. He inflicted substantial and lasting harm, amassing a mountain of technical debt which the company will be paying down for decades to come.

Livestream If you are not able to join us in person, we'll be streaming Evan's talk at 7pm. Please visit the meetup page to get the link for the livestream. A recording will be posted to our Tech Talk page as well.

Dinner, prepared by Airbnb's Executive Chef, will be served at 6pm.

Airbnb Tech Talk: Evan Priestley of Facebook - Move Fast and Break Things
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Re: Airbnb Tech Talk: Evan Priestley of Facebook - Move Fast and Break Things

#2
If an engineer at Bank of America said something to this tune, it'd have tremendous negative consequence as it should. Facebook is reaching a point where breaking things should not be okay simply because it opens up the possibility of breaking privacy settings and causing great damage.

Lots of people have pretty sensitive data within facebook with very granular privacy settings. When I read this attitude from facebook, it scares the shit out of me.

I'd love to hear more about why I shouldn't fear that their "Show this post to only x group of people" feature will break and result in everyone being able to see all my posts. What are your testing procedures for that and at what point are those kind of bugs caught?

Re: Airbnb Tech Talk: Evan Priestley of Facebook - Move Fast and Break Things

#5
post #2

If an engineer at Bank of America said something to this tune, it'd have tremendous negative consequence as it should. Facebook is reaching a point where breaking things should not be okay simply because it opens up the possibility of breaking privacy settings and causing great damage. Lots of people have pretty sensitive data within facebook with very granular privacy settings. When I read this attitude from faceboo…

While it's evident that Bank of America and Facebook are two different animals with entirely unique cultures, it's is worthwhile to mention that Facebook does balance the "Most fast, break things" mantra with proper control mechanisms.

For example, there is a layer called Gatekeeper that ensures only certain features are shown to users and that with a flick of a switch, code can be decommissioned in the event of a crash or breach.

Re: Airbnb Tech Talk: Evan Priestley of Facebook - Move Fast and Break Things

#6
post #2

If an engineer at Bank of America said something to this tune, it'd have tremendous negative consequence as it should. Facebook is reaching a point where breaking things should not be okay simply because it opens up the possibility of breaking privacy settings and causing great damage. Lots of people have pretty sensitive data within facebook with very granular privacy settings. When I read this attitude from faceboo…

Facebook is, by a huge margin, the buggiest release software that I use every day. When I look hard, I notice at least a dozen UI bugs a week. Yet, Facebook is hugely successful -- so successful, in fact, that it's hard for me to think of ways in which it could be more successful. Your comment implies that there is some threshold that they will pass, at which point they will be forced to adopt more stable sensibilities. There are 1 billion active users [1], so I ask: if they haven't gotten to this point, when exactly will they?

I don't believe the lack of quality in Facebook code poses an existential threat to Facebook, and I don't believe it ever will:

(1) Facebook code is not Google code, but it is not bad code, it's just not needlessly good code. If Google is consistently buggy, anyone can switch to Bing. On the other hand, switching from Facebook is really hard. Their core services are not easily replaceable. People are willing to put up with more. Note that this is even true in the case of businesses: Facebook is horrible to develop against, but developers don't have a choice.

As the network grows, this cost will be higher, which means Facebook can throw its weight around more, not less. This is exactly opposite of the situation you predict. The only thing that can really reverse this is if there is a viable competitor, but the increased growth of Facebook makes this increasingly unlikely. It is clear, in any event, that G+ is not quite there.

(2) By maintaining a lower bar, Facebook actually has an advantage. It is a website, and can fix its product at will. Code can be deployed quickly and rolled back accordingly, making failure cheap. This means they can concentrate on things that really matter like user acquisition.

(3) Facebook does not run nuclear reactors or bank systems. There is a high incentive to switch from buggy bank systems. There is little incentive to switch from buggy social network websites.

footnotes:

[1] whatever that means

Re: Airbnb Tech Talk: Evan Priestley of Facebook - Move Fast and Break Things

#7
post #4

Evan is hilarious, check out all the copy on http://phabricator.org/ for an example. However he should probably have been described as ex-Facebook, he left quite a while ago.

Evan is the man - he is without doubt one of the funniest people I knew at Facebook.

We're also big fans of Phabricator over here at MemSQL.

Re: Airbnb Tech Talk: Evan Priestley of Facebook - Move Fast and Break Things

#8
This is such a grey are that I think it's close to impossible to make a rule about how much quality you should sacrifice for the sake of speed. Sometimes you might get lucky and break something insignificant, sometimes you create the IceBox Pro fiasco and be remembered at "that company". It's all calculated risk / gambling.

On the other hand, perhaps someone will argue that all publicity is good publicity.

Re: Airbnb Tech Talk: Evan Priestley of Facebook - Move Fast and Break Things

#9
post #2

If an engineer at Bank of America said something to this tune, it'd have tremendous negative consequence as it should. Facebook is reaching a point where breaking things should not be okay simply because it opens up the possibility of breaking privacy settings and causing great damage. Lots of people have pretty sensitive data within facebook with very granular privacy settings. When I read this attitude from faceboo…

The "break fast and move things" mantra isn't black and white, nor is it universal. It is a general alignment that, at the high level says, don't be afraid to make calculated mistakes but be prepared to quickly respond to feedback and those mistakes as appropriate.

That means a privacy or a security issue will be tackled with the utmost urgency--we would even shut down the site if we didn't have a quick fix for a security/privacy bug. However, if one of the Timeline aggregations isn't working or if a particular text box is not aligned, then we will fix it with the next release (usually in another day or half).

So it's not true that "move fast and break things" means "it's OK to introduce privacy/security holes" or even "it's OK to release shitty products". It just means we push early and push often.

Re: Airbnb Tech Talk: Evan Priestley of Facebook - Move Fast and Break Things

#10
post #6
post #2

If an engineer at Bank of America said something to this tune, it'd have tremendous negative consequence as it should. Facebook is reaching a point where breaking things should not be okay simply because it opens up the possibility of breaking privacy settings and causing great damage. Lots of people have pretty sensitive data within facebook with very granular privacy settings. When I read this attitude from faceboo…

Facebook is, by a huge margin, the buggiest release software that I use every day. When I look hard, I notice at least a dozen UI bugs a week. Yet, Facebook is hugely successful -- so successful, in fact, that it's hard for me to think of ways in which it could be more successful. Your comment implies that there is some threshold that they will pass, at which point they will be forced to adopt more stable sensibiliti…

(3) Facebook does not run nuclear reactors or bank systems. There is a high incentive to switch from buggy bank systems. There is little incentive to switch from buggy social network websites.

I'm arguing that facebook wants to run something even more important than a banking system. For example, Facebook wants me to share posts that are only visible to me. Such a post could contain secrets that could have huge consequences on my life and life of others' if they became public. It is pretty clear from facebook's history that each year, they want you to share more of such private data.

They started with you being able to share your drunk party pics. They are headed towards actually becoming something like PayPal. Really, facebook should behave more like a bank than just-another-social-network if it wants its users remain confident. In this respect, looking at their past success to as proof that all is well is a mistake because I am certain facebook intends to be much more than what it is five years from now.

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