this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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Facebook uses Mercurial, but when people praise their developer tooling it's not just that. They're using their CLI which is built on top of Mercurial but cleans up its errors and commands further, it's all running on their own virtual filesystem (EdenFS), their dev testing in a customized version of chromium, and they sync code using their own in-house equivalent of GitHub, and all of it connects super nicely into their own customized version of VS Codium.
Damn that sounds sick
The source control was so smooth and pleasant that it convinced me that git isn't the be all end all, and the general developer focus was super nice, but some of that tooling was pretty janky, poorly documented, and you had no stack overflow to fall back on. And some of it (like EdenFS), really felt like it was the duct tape holding that overloaded monorepo together (complete with all the jankiness of a duct tape solution).
What you can do with 84000 employees
And some good management. Probably not a common opinion around here, but my company is not a tenth of that size, with a hundredth the number of devs, yet different teams still end up copy pasting libraries. Because it's faster than convincing management DevOps is important.
And kinda horrifying. If something goes wrong, no Google, it's straight to IT
There's probably specific ticket queues and wiki/doc spaces for each support team.
Problem with an app? Send it to the internal dev/support team. Then if needed it gets routed.
The inhouse tooling from the massive tech companies is very cool but I always wonder how that impacts transferrable skills. I work in a much smaller shop but intentionally make tech decisions that will give our engineers a highly transferrable skill set. If someone wants to leave it should be easy to bring their knowledge to bear elsewhere.
Speaking from my own experience and a few other seniors I work with, you try to recreate solutions you like at those smaller shops. It may not be identical, but you know what's possible.
I came into a company that didn't have a system to manage errors. At my old job, errors would get grouped automatically and work can be prioritized through the groupings. The new company only handled errors when they saw it, by word of mouth.
Immediately went to work setting up a similar system.
There’s also a whole industry of ex-Googlers reimplementing Google tooling as SaaS services to sell to other ex-Googlers at other companies.
There’s even a lookup table: https://github.com/jhuangtw/xg2xg
(some of those are open source projects, some are SaaS services)
Absolutely does. Source: worked for Amazon.
I agree. I personally know nothing about tooling like this but I went through the tooling used at rockstar for example GTA V and it was very cool to how much they have automated and made tools easier to use.
Made easier to use like in when their codebase was leaked and no one had successfully built a game from it?
in-house tools often encourage making a mess heavily reliant on those tools or working around their limitations, in my experience
People have successfully compiled GTA V if that is what you are saying.
Of course no one would make another game using leaked tools, that would be incredibly stupid.
No, that was what I meant, I thought they didn't, I was wrong, it turned out
Yeah, people successfully compiled and ran the game within a few days of the leak.
I tried myself but I didn't get it to work. But I'm no developer and I tried doing it in a VM (no way those files touch my real computer) which was annoying so I gave up quite quickly.
Oh, it impacts indeed. And I would expect that to be partially to keep the devs from hopping away, as they will have a hard time transferring
On the other hand, onboarding is longer and wastes more time and money of the company ¯\_(ツ)_/¯