Few companies experienced the explosive growth fb did, though many will claim to have done so. Hack made the existing codebase of php scale to insane levels while reaching escape velocity for the overall company to even attempt to transition away or shrink the php codebase, as i recall (i was an SRE, not a dev)

zeus likewise.

You worked at FB, but you call yourself an SRE, not a PE? ;)

You still call it Facebook?

PEs are still quite new remember....

haha .. but i did work at google before fb.

my memory is hazy, but when i started i was called an sre. Then someone made up the term "app ops". then it was production engineering. then I called myself an SRE when i was interviewing to leave fb.

Oh, and i was called a DBA before being acquired by google.

This is also how things work at Google.

Google also maintains a monorepo with "forks" of all software that they use. History diverges, but is occasionally synchronized for things like security updates etc.

Am I completely off-base/confused thinking that the GFE originally started life (like back under csilver) as a fork of boa[0]?

[0]: http://www.boa.org/

I thought it was GWS that originally started as a fork of boa.

That's it, yes, thank you.

nit: HHVM was a completely new implementation of a runtime for a PHP-like language, it wasn't a fork of Zend.