Facebook moves fast because of vision, collaboration, and trust. The fast pace of development is enabled by constantly improving infrastructure and a sense of unity throughout the company.  In Facebook’s early days, there was an emphasis on rapidly deploying new code to drive constant improvement and experimentation.  Product quality was maintained by engineers closely checking

Facebook was built using PHP, a programming language that was used widely in the late 90s and early 2000s. PHP allows developers to get web applications built quickly and easily, although PHP has a reputation for being difficult to scale.  In the early days of Facebook, the company was scaling rapidly on every dimension.  New

Data engineering allows a company to take advantage of the large quantities of data that the company has generated. In many companies, new data has been produced rapidly for many years, but the company has not been able to take full advantage of it.  Creating large data sets does not provide immediate value for a

Software engineers have a wide variety of media to choose from, including podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, conferences. The amount of software engineering media that is available is growing and accelerating. Eight years ago, there were not as many options for information about software. Charles Max Wood founded Devchat.tv to create a network of podcasts and

Software applications running within a host operating system need to be isolated. Isolation prevents security vulnerabilities, such as one application accessing the memory of another. In modern cloud environments, a single physical host might be running multiple virtual machines on top of a hypervisor. Those virtual machines might be divided up into containers. The different

Creating a software company has never been easier. Software engineers are increasingly seeing entrepreneurship as a viable career path. But the path to being an independent software developer is not always clear.  Most engineers spend some of their career working at a software company. Even an engineer who intends to build a company someday can

Edge computing allows for faster data access and computation. When your client application makes a request, that request might be routed to the edge. Edge servers are more numerous and more widely distributed than normal data centers, but an edge server might not have all of the data or the complete application logic for the

Today’s episode is a keynote I gave at Full Stack Tech Radar Day in Tel Aviv. The talk is called “You Are Not a Commodity”. This talk is also available as a YouTube video. The slides can be accessed here. The world of commodity engineering is coming to an end. Developers are becoming more productive,

ListenNotes allows users to find podcasts by categories, popularity, and search queries. ListenNotes is not a podcast client that you download onto your phone, but it allows users to build playlists. These playlists are automatically published to an RSS feed, so that users can curate a playlist on desktop and subscribe to that playlist from

Open source software allows developers to take code from the Internet and modify it for their own use. Open source has allowed innovation to occur on a massive scale. Today, open source software powers our consumer client applications and our backend cloud server infrastructure.  Linux powers single node operating systems and Kubernetes is the foundation