Facebook's new comms: 'our largest ever engineering project'

The creation of Facebook's new messaging system was the company's largest-ever engineering project, according to director of engineering Andrew Bosworth. The project spanned more than a year, according to company founder Mark Zuckerberg, and it included the roll-out of a new distributed database platform. The system uses HBase …

[Anonymous Coward]

Gold

Thats 15 cv's updated with the equivalent of pure gold plating. Jobs for life in IT? 15 of us can look forward to it at least.

Kudos.

[Terry Kiely]

Facebook

and I wonder if their FB profiles are shouthing it?

godd luck to 'em all

[Tom Westheimer]

FB database

FB is such a slow and awkward interface I can't imagine what 15 engineers can accomplish in a WHOLE year. Since when did a WHOLE year become a long time ?

[Anonymous Coward]

But how much testing.

You can do a lot with 15 engineers in a year. The question is - did they do any proper testing? Over on the developer blog they have admitted to pushing fixes out without proper testing because they don't have unit tests for a lot of their platform (but they did spend a whole day writing some the other day!).

Given the security issues with FB and the flakiness of their platform and a continually changing API (Their latest set of changes will "break some applications" - and that's a direct quote) I think this is going to me an unmitigated disaster.

[DZ-Jay]

Remember, kids...

When Facebook says "engineers" they mean a mix of software developers and web-dev HTML/JavaScript kiddies.

-dZ.

[Anonymous Coward]

15 developers working on a project for a year. wooopee.

My friend has spent 15 years trying to cure cancer and he has hardly scratched the surface. If you are going to shout about doing something immense and difficult at least make sure it is first.

Nothing like believing your own drivel I say.

[multipharious]

Fifteen

Get the right guys in the room (so to speak) and you can do a lot. Very frequently most of the heavy lifting can be done by a single guy or a couple of them if supported properly. Guess we will see as they roll it out if it was fifteen aces handpicked for the project or just fifteen guys that worked with Hadoop at one point or another. I am hoping for the former.