
2013: A Year of Open Source at Facebook - jamesgpearce
https://code.facebook.com/posts/604847252884576/2013-a-year-of-open-source-at-facebook/
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jamesgpearce
I help with open source @ Facebook and wrote this article. AMA.

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rmrfrmrf
Hey there! I have lot of experience programming but not a lot of CS theory and
low level engineering behind it. I find things like HHVM to be really
inspiring, and I'd love to one day contribute to such a project. My question
is-- how can I cross over from a script kiddie on steroids to a software
engineer? Is there any hope if I'm not doctorate track? I'd appreciate any
open resources you provide. Thank you for your great work!

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jamesgpearce
It takes all sorts! and the best way to prove your chops is to just jump. You
can fork HHVM and start by picking up a few of the easier issues and working
through them. Our engineers on that project are really friendly and helpful.
What can I say... dive in! What is the worst that can happen?

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bliti
I did not know about React. It looks to be like the solution I need for one of
my personal projects. In your experience, how does a React code base evolve as
it grows? I've bumped into other libraries and frameworks that look simple at
first, but then evolve into a big mess.

I ventured into the careers area of the site. The computer vision engineering
position caught my attention. Do you mind talking about what the position
entails? The description is rather vague.

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code_duck
Same here, I like the look and sound of React and was not aware of it
previously. The funky XML-like syntax seems appealing, but then, I thought
that about Scala too and that didn't turn out super well for me.

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gfosco
Several good comments/links here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6936951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6936951)

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bliti
Thank you.

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meowface
Say what you will about Facebook and some of their privacy concerns, but they
definitely are full of true engineers.

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te_chris
Likely the source of the loose attitude on privacy.

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cpeterso
For example, every software developer at Facebook has root access to all
production servers and databases.

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meowface
Source? Do you work there, or know someone who does?

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onedev
Even interns had this access.

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meowface
I've been given root access to a handful of internal servers as an intern at
some companies in the past, but never database servers or production,
customer-facing servers. That seems rather ridiculous.

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onedev
It's just part of the engineering culture there. There's a lot of transparency
and they try to keep everything as open as they can internally.

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oscargrouch
Could you guys open source the graph processing architecture, besides giraph,
like unicorn or the technology behind the graph search, huh? come on, its
christmas! :)

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pyman
Don't forget MyNSA, the software the NSA uses to connect to MySQL databases.

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jtsnow
Missing from the list is Phabricator
([http://phabricator.org/](http://phabricator.org/)). We've started using it
recently and found it to be fantastic.

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girvo
I remember looking at Phabricator for project management stuff, but felt that
as a single freelance developer I wouldn't get enough out of it that would
replace GitLab... What do you think? I'm going to have a play with it tomorrow
to see what it's like.

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yareally
I suppose if you wish to review your own code outside of opening files or
through version control alone, it might be useful. That's its ultimate purpose
(and facilitating code review in a collaborative way). I think it's a bit
overkill for individual development though.

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skillcode
Eh, what the heck, it's the holiday season. Good job, Facebook.

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jamesgpearce
Thanks :)

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amaks
Engineers at Facebook must be in an interesting position. Working on
interesting technical problems behind the controversial social network
offering the only way they can make world a better place is by contributing
their products to the open source community.

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crorella
I agree.

Facebook is a company with an awful product, but great byproducts like all the
open source projects listed here.

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onedev
What's your reasoning for why FB is an awful product? I'm curious.

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amaks
Ad proliferated news feed, selective update selection, photo resizing. The
list can go on and on. Guys in FB have too much Koolaid.

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yeukhon
When will they announce their usage of hg at Facebook?

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jamesgpearce
It's in the blog post that we are active contributors to the project... :)

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yeukhon
I know, but they don't mention what exactly they are using hg for. Someone
(from IRC) said they were using this for some "secret" thing :)

From IRC I know someone has said git didn't scale very well for Facebook.

