Facebook announced that they are going to release their PHP to C++ source code transformer, called HipHop as open source. The article describes some amazing things like “With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page.”
Something strange about the part where they describe the reason behind the development of HipHop, though. They say that in order to enhance performance the common solution is to write parts of your back end in C++ or Java. The reason they chose a different route is because it “…drastically reduces the number of engineers who are able to work on your entire application…Given that our engineering team is relatively small — there are over one million users to every engineer — we can’t afford to make parts of our codebase less accessible than others.” Maybe it’s just me but this sounds like Facebook has too few engineers and most of them are not capable of picking up C++.
The book Ruby best practices is going to be given away for free. A new chapter is going to be published every friday on the web site
The first chapter Driving Code Through Tests unit testing and Test-Driven Development. It has very nice examples that are very readable but not too trivial. If you don’t consider yourself a TDD-guru, I suggest reading it. Even if you’re not a Ruby developer.
Agile is not edgy enough. Twittch
“we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.” — Anonymous Facebook employee
[video]
“While you’re busy poppin’ stacks I’ll pop a cap in your skull/
While you smoke your crack pipe I’m gonna pipe you to /dev/null/
I may not have a label but I rap like a star/
I’m an unsigned long int and you’re an 8-bit char.”
— Monzy - So Much Drama in the PhD