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I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

ryanwaggoner.com

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Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#71

Post by onewland »

krobertson wrote: post #50
seancron wrote: post #44

In case anyone didn't see it down at the bottom, this comment was left on the post: Ryan (& Everyone Else) – My name is Mike Vernal, and I manage the engineering team for Facebook Platform. I understand and am legitimately sorry for the frustration you guys are experiencing. I think there were three themes in this post — frequency of change, bugs, and documentation. I wanted to give you some more context on all three…

Very interesting. As an FB developer, some of the bugs they introduce (and re-introduce) are baffling. Their QA process always appears non-existant. I'd like to believe him, but would have to see it first. We often file bugs that sit there forever, and some parts of their platform break on a weekly cycle, if not more often.

I worked at a company developing proprietary image processing SDKs (more like libraries) for .NET/ActiveX. We actually had very extensive QA, probably >100% code coverage (at least 1 test for most code paths) in unit and functional tests, but it's really difficult to predict how customers are going to use your product.

For this reason, newer employees had to do a cycle of QA/support/dev, where you found out that there would always be one customer whose entire use case was the one case you didn't test for, and that makes your toolkit fail horribly. I'm not excusing these bugs, and Facebook is certainly a more complex platform to build on top of, but I can certainly see how a QA team could be working nonstop and appearing to accomplish nothing.

(Also note that since leaving this job better testing tools have come out/become more popular. The Ruby community especially is very oriented toward automating "mutate this test until it fails".)

Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#73

Post by vondip »

I love this thread. The last six month of frustration finally have a place to express itself.

I found Facebook's documentation to be awful, and their online tools not very clear \ friendly. What I did find immensely useful is the community's support and knowledge. SO is filled with excellent questions and “How To”s. Also Facebook's developer forum is quite good. In other words, my fellow developers... keep on the good work, help build a strong community, Facebook sure isn't.

Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#74

Post by callumjones »

ntoshev wrote: post #28
natch wrote: post #20

Their iPhone Facebook Connect documentation is beyond atrocious. What little there is was written by someone who, besides not being a non-native English speaker, also does not care about getting things right. Several people have mentioned how bad the documentation is, but nobody has provided examples. In case anyone from Facebook (or "facebook" as it's sometimes called in the docs) reads this and cares, I'm putting s…

This is just spelling / grammar, I have no problems with these errors, especially when the main documentation is wiki-based (this may be because I'm not a native speaker). In my limited experience with Facebook docs before the Open Graph API, I haven't seen factual errors, but there are a lot of omissions. Open Graph API seems very clean and it also seems like it doesn't need much documentation... if the API calls ac…

I hate to be picky but it seems to be getting out of control.

Graph API - The Facebook API for querying the Facebook graph

Open Graph Protocol - The "standard" for be able to query meta and classify a particular website.

Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#75

Post by someone_here »

kragen wrote: post #54
douglasp wrote: post #36

I agree with most of the comments here and on the blog post; having hit many of the same issues myself. Fortunately, I get to do something about it. I work for Facebook (joined ~3 weeks ago). Part of my job is to help fix the developer site, documentation, etc. (along with a host of other issues related to developer relations). We are working on updating the site and docs as fast as we can and this thread is helpful.…

When are you going to put the Wiki back online? That should be a matter of a few man-hours of work. Until then, it's not believable to claim "We're working on updating the site and docs as fast as we can." In my experience developing a couple of FB apps in the past, the information in the Wiki was absolutely crucial. (I'm talking about the Wiki that was located at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/ in the past.)

It's up now!

Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#76

Post by kragen »

someone_here wrote: post #75
kragen wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When are you going to put the Wiki back online? That should be a matter of a few man-hours of work. Until then, it's not believable to claim "We're working on updating the site and docs as fast as we can." In my experience developing a couple of FB apps in the past, the information in the Wiki was absolutely crucial. (I'm talking about the Wiki that was located at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/ in the past.)

It's up now!

No, it's not.

Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

#77

Post by neilcrookes »

bananaandapple wrote: post #35
robryan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Twitter API is excellent in comparison, I guess in a way the newer Facebook API drew a lot of inspiration from it. Problem is it was rushed out and judging by the article and comments left here not much has happened documentation wise in the last 3 months or more since I last touched it.

What actions can you do in twitter? 1. Post a tweet That's everything.

You can do everything through the API that you can on twitter.com. In fact the new twitter.com site uses the API! One more thing, their API does what it says in the docs... when twitter is up ;-)
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