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A comment on Back end of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10 with some interesting tweaks. Parent comment

Re:Back end of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10 with s... by nikhizzle on Thursday July 06, 2023 @02:01PM (#36620178)
Earlyish facebook engineer here. Early days FB php was nothing like the php used to template websites. All kinds of specialized libraries to enable a much more sophisticated programming style. Think functional helpers, and asynchronous execution on thousands of cores, spanning trees across data centers using ssh etc. As a tangent a lot of the good stuff I used was written by Evan Priestley, who also did Phabricator and lots of other strong systems.
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Re:Back end of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10 with s... by iknowSFR on Thursday July 06, 2023 @02:27PM (#36620575)
Can you speak to the onboarding and learning curve in that environment? What was the training like? What kinds of timelines did you experience regarding expectations as a new hire?

Asking because I’m curious about these early stage mega-tech companies that are working at a scale I can’t fathom.

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Re:Back end of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10 with s... by nikhizzle on Thursday July 06, 2023 @03:28PM (#36621482)
Six week boot camp, you are pretty fluent by week 4. Notably though this was before mega tech days, we had under 100 engineers.
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Re:Back end of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10 with s... by supernikio2 on Thursday July 06, 2023 @03:10PM (#36621232)
I'm of course speaking from an outsider's point of view, but do you think PHP was a good option, or was it a "fitting a square peg into a round hole" situation?
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Re:Back end of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10 with s... by nikhizzle on Thursday July 06, 2023 @03:29PM (#36621491)
It was not a deliberate choice, just it was what the site was built in, so people like Evan and Marcel (Laverdet) made php beautiful for us.
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Re:Back end of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10 with s... by troupo on Thursday July 06, 2023 @03:42PM (#36621691)
> but do you think PHP was a good option, or was it a "fitting a square peg into a round hole" situation?

Facebook was founded in 2004. Whatever fancy tech you're thinking that would fit the round hole, it didn't exist then. They also never thought it would serve a couple billion of users one day, so they built it in whatever they had and knew at the time.

Same for Instagram and Python (they started with Django).

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Re:Back end of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10 with s... by zitterbewegung on Thursday July 06, 2023 @04:56PM (#36622890)
How they have used Instagram with Django is that they have replaced pieces of Django over time with custom parts which is a benefit of the design of Django.
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Re:Back end of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10 with s... by TSUTiger on Thursday July 06, 2023 @08:39PM (#36625434)
Random question... whatever happened to that visual friend/network graph that used to load on a separate window? I always thought that thing was pretty neat to see
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Re:Back end of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10 with s... by tyingq on Friday July 07, 2023 @12:35AM (#36627189)
>Early days FB php was nothing like the php used to template websites. All kinds of specialized libraries to enable a much more sophisticated programming style.

No idea if this was a credible leak of actual 2007-ish FB php, but it doesn't look like what you're describing.

https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406

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