Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta developer tools: Working at scale

engineering.fb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 228 posts

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#71

Post by MikeTheRocker »

optymizer wrote: post #60
zug_zug wrote: post #19

I think Meta's tooling is inferior to industry standard. I actually took a survey while I was there, and that wasn't the majority opinion, but frankly I think most outsiders would absolutely agree. Things like Eden were a great idea, but tools had all sorts of issues they gloss over (a virtual file system can be really slow if you have a ton of small files), dev environments would randomly fail a lot, really the only…

For what it's worth, as a Meta employee, I generally disagree with this comment. I mean, calling it 'inferior' is just laughable. It's way better than what open source projects have access to and it's way better than Amazon internal tooling (is that 'industry standard' enough?). The sapling workflow is better than git. I was skeptical when I joined, but between no branches and excellent stack and merge support, it's…

Having also written Android code at Meta, I 100% agree.

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#72

Post by morgannewman »

jonathankoren wrote: post #36

I stopped reading when I reached that they made their own CVS. This is a solved problem, and even if it isn’t, there’s entire communities dedicated to it. There’s literally no reason why Facebook needs to be in the business of reinventing the wheel from scratch beyond some dude trying to show “impact”. It’s a distraction from core business problems.

You might be surprised to learn that it was not and still is not a solved problem for companies like Meta. Here is an earlier write-up about this topic from Meta: https://engineering.fb.com/2014/01/07/core-data/scaling-merc...

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#73

Post by KaiserPro »

castlecrasher2 wrote: post #51
rangledangle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No company I've worked at after FB/Meta ships or works even at a non-eng level with the same velocity. I always attributed that to their internal tools, since most of the other companies seem to be using the same crap. Slack is straight up painful compared to their chat system. And don't get me started on the how good the task tool is compared to literally any other ticketing system out there. Everything is behind th…

>Slack is straight up painful compared to their chat system. As someone who vastly prefers Slack over all its competitors, I'm very interested in hearing how Meta's compares. What makes it better than Slack for you?

As a chat system workplace is inferior to slack. Discovery and organisation of chats are hard, especially group chats that would normally be a channel.

However the combination of the "newsgroup" and chat makes it kinda better than slack on it's own.

Would I use workplace at a new startup? probably not. I would use slack though.

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#74

Post by KaiserPro »

taeric wrote: post #24
zug_zug wrote: post #19

I think Meta's tooling is inferior to industry standard. I actually took a survey while I was there, and that wasn't the majority opinion, but frankly I think most outsiders would absolutely agree. Things like Eden were a great idea, but tools had all sorts of issues they gloss over (a virtual file system can be really slow if you have a ton of small files), dev environments would randomly fail a lot, really the only…

I can't really compare to Meta, but I will confess that "industry standard" tooling has been very disappointing for me. Trying to get a build setup that automatically pulls in dependency changes once a week is something I'm still not entirely sure how to do in a way that everyone agrees with. Seems most tools bake that into a code commit with a lock file nowadays. But even that is amusingly recent. Years ago, you had…

FB's log shipping and parsing is much better than "industry" however we ship billions of logs to get a metric, because the internal graphite service isn't easy to use. and unidash really sucks compared to grafana for non-SQL based metric discovery and prototyping.

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#76

Post by jonathankoren »

rigelbm wrote: post #39
jonathankoren wrote: post #36

I stopped reading when I reached that they made their own CVS. This is a solved problem, and even if it isn’t, there’s entire communities dedicated to it. There’s literally no reason why Facebook needs to be in the business of reinventing the wheel from scratch beyond some dude trying to show “impact”. It’s a distraction from core business problems.

> This is a solved problem. Hosting a gigantic monorepo for 25K concurrent users is so far from a solved problem.

[flagged]

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#77

Post by 4ggr0 »

dmoy wrote: post #68
kayson wrote: post #50

I know git is complex, and the UX is sometimes messy, but after really, really learning it (shoutout to the Github training folks), I've never had any problems that couldn't be solved. I understand the desire to simplify some things, and their log looks way better than gits, but I wish they'd contribute back instead of rolling their own entire VCS. The one thing that is super exciting to me is the stacked pull reques…

I think the biggest issue is that back around 2011/2012 ish, when Facebook devs went to git core devs and asked how they could get git to scale to the size of their predicted monorepo, the response was roughly "no, shard it". git falls over and dies really, really badly when the repo gets stupidly large. There's an article alluding to the discussion here: https://engineering.fb.com/2014/01/07/core-data/scaling-merc..…

Maybe this is the mailing list you were searching for?[0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210119051414/http://git.661346...

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#79

Post by [deleted] »

__float wrote: post #55
jonathankoren wrote: post #36

I stopped reading when I reached that they made their own CVS. This is a solved problem, and even if it isn’t, there’s entire communities dedicated to it. There’s literally no reason why Facebook needs to be in the business of reinventing the wheel from scratch beyond some dude trying to show “impact”. It’s a distraction from core business problems.

What version control system do you consider to have solved it?

[deleted]

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#80

Post by giraffe_lady »

phyrex wrote: post #67
wussboy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the barrier to working at Facebook is the fact their product is causing so much harm in our world, from elections to the environment to mental health to the breakdown of social capital. I know I’ll be downvoted for taking an ethical rather than financial or technological position, but ethics matter. Especially in technology and finances.

It's also doing a lot of good. It's in the nature of any broadcasting and communications platform

"drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"
Post reply on HN