
Interview with Facebook's Andrei Alexandrescu - kmavm
http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-facebook-research-engineer-andrei-alexandrescu/
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alabut
Love his answer to #7 on what advice he'd give to a new developer:

"7. What advice would you give to a beginner server-side developer and what to
an open-source author / contributor?

Meh, advice-shmadvice. Who am I to give advice? What’s experience good for in
our field? I used to know how to write a keyboard driver and floppy disc
formatters with non-standard densities. I’d be all but obsolete today if I
hadn’t learned continuously.

Oh, so maybe this would be one piece of advice: learn how to learn, and stick
with principles; mastering individual technologies will follow.

Technology is a great servant but a terrible master. The best people in our
métier are those who know how to quickly become experts in some particular
field."

Reminds me of Paul B's video from startup school:

<http://youtu.be/EZxP0i9ah8E>

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eliben
Alexandrescu is a great programmer, and it's well worth heeding to his advice.

While reading "Modern C++" and being honestly horrified by the complexity of
C++ and the way you have to fight the compiler and the language to get
flexible code working, I was also mightily impressed by Alexandrescu's
prowess. It's not hard to see how deeply he understands programming at the
most basic level. His writing makes that book very pleasant to read.

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j_col
I find it sad that he is asked to defend Facebook's decision to continue to
use PHP. Given that Facebook is probably the largest website in the World now,
the real question should be why other sites are not copying their software
stack choices?

* edited for grammar.

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sausagefeet
Given all the work they do to get around PHP it seems more like an "in spite
of" not "because of" situation.

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Jare
If you look at all the value that Facebook (and many other companies) have
derived from working with PHP, it's definitely a "because of PHP's strengths"
and "in spite of PHP's problems".

No technology is perfect, but imperfect technology that lets you Get Stuff
Done(tm) goes a long way.

~~~
sausagefeet
What strengths of PHP are you referring to here? TCB (Taking Care of Business)
seems to be a programmer trait. Considering they have written their own
implementation of PHP it seems like PHP didn't offer them much other than then
original authors knew how to write it. I could be talking about any language
in that case.

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adambyrtek
> To wit, our email and calendar software is off-the-shelf and is the most
> unpleasant tool to deal with. Get this – we have a few people “specialized”
> in sending large meeting invites out, because there are bugs that require
> peculiar expertise to work around. Not to mention that such invites come
> with “Do not accept from an iPhone lest you corrupt the invite for
> everyone!”

If only they used Google Apps :)

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fdb
The post mentions concurrent hash tables for C++. Any ideas on which
implementation they use? Or are they written in-house?

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stewbrew

        I wish I’d convince a serious hacker to bring things to the point where
        <?d writeln("Hello, world!"); ?>
        could be inserted in a web page.
    

OMG!

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boubountu
Very nice interview. Although, I strongly oppose the style of interview
questions he is vouching for when recruiting new employees at Facebook. I am a
PhD student. I focus on parallel computing. I was interviewed by a company in
Seattle. The interviewer asked me to write a function to convert from Decimal
to Roman numbers. This was ridiculous. Not even once during the interview I
was asked about my past experience or my research.

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helmut_hed
So... how did you do on the question?

~~~
boubountu
I sucked.

~~~
sausagefeet
It'd be so easy if it weren't for the number 9!

