Facebook engineering is designed to self-assemble. When an engineer joins Facebook, the engineer goes through boot camp, where they are exposed to multiple projects to find a good fit in terms of technical skills and personal preferences. Since there are so many different initiatives within the company at any given moment, a new hire can

When Facebook was scaling in its early years, the company developed engineering practices that were unlike any other organization before it. Early Facebook engineering developed unusual practices because the problem set was unusual. Facebook was a highly detailed, highly interactive, multi-user web application. Facebook was pushing the limits of PHP and JavaScript in a time

Facebook engineering is commonly described by two words: move fast. Building products quickly has been a differentiating characteristic of the company since its inception. From the longtime engineers to the summer interns, Facebook instills a sense of immediacy and opportunity in all of its employees. The goal of Facebook is to make the world more

Software engineering is harder than it should be. There are many people who have an app idea that they are not sure how to build. Some of these people are highly technical professionals like real estate agents, scientists, and accountants. These professionals learn to use spreadsheets in their day-to-day work. Spreadsheets are also used widely

Relational data systems have evolved from single node instances to complex distributed systems. Almost any database can be accessed through a SQL statement, but the guarantees of these databases can vary in terms of consistency, availability, latency, durability, and financial cost. Relational database systems that explore these different sets of tradeoffs are sometimes categorized as

WebAssembly is a binary instruction format for applications to run in a memory-constrained, stack-based virtual machine. The WebAssembly ecosystem consists of tools and projects that allow programs in a variety of languages to compile into WebAssembly and run in a safe, fast, sandboxed runtime environment. WebAssembly is a transformative technology for the Internet. Most users

Relational databases such as Postgres are often used for critical workloads, such as user account data. To run a relational database service in the cloud requires a cloud provider to set up a highly durable, highly available system. Jon Daniel is an infrastructure engineer at Heroku. Jon joins the show to describe the engineering and

Satellite images contain vast quantities of data. By analyzing the contents of satellite images over time, we can identify trends in weather, soil, and agriculture. If we combine that data with ground-level sensors, we can gather a clearer understanding of how chemicals in the air or in the dirt map to how things look from

The modern software supply chain contains many different points of distribution: JavaScript frameworks, npm modules, Docker containers, open source repositories, cloud providers, on-prem firmware, IoT, networking proxies, and so much more. With so much attack surface, securing a large enterprise is an uphill battle. Jeff Williams is the CTO at Contrast Security, a company that

Growing a software business requires an understanding of engineering, sales, and marketing. As we learn software engineering, we also pick up some knowledge about how a business should operate. We know that there are customers, and that our product needs to be scalable to serve more customers. We know that some features are more important