Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Blogmarks tagged facebook in 2018

Filters: Type: blogmark × Year: 2018 × facebook × Sorted by date


XARs: An efficient system for self-contained executables (via) Really interesting new open source project from Facebook: a XAR is a new way of packaging up a Python executable complete with its dependencies and resources such that it can be distributed and executed elsewhere as a single file. It’s kind of like a Docker container without Docker—it uses the SquashFS compressed read-only filesystem. I can’t wait to try this out with Datasette. # 13th July 2018, 7 pm

Migrating Messenger storage to optimize performance (via) Fascinating case-study of a truly gargantuan migration. Messenger has over a billion users, and Facebook successfully migrated its backend storage from HBase to their MyRocks database (a fork of MySQL with a storage engine built on their SSD-optimized RocksDB key/value library) without any user-visible downtime. They ended up using two migration paths: one for the 99.9% of regular accounts, and a separate path for extremely high volume accounts (businesses with very active chat bots or support systems). # 27th June 2018, 3:05 pm

Pyre: Fast Type Checking for Python (via) Facebook’s alternative to mypy. “Pyre is designed to be highly parallel, optimizing for near-instant responses so that you get immediate feedback, even in a large codebase”. Like their Hack type checker for PHP, Pyre is implemented in OCaml. # 11th May 2018, 5:47 pm

Upgrades to Facebook’s link security (via) Facebook have started scanning links shared on the site for HSTS headers, which are used to indicate that an HTTP page is also available over HTTPS and are intended to be cached by browsers such that future HTTP access is automatically retrieved over HTTPS instead. Facebook will now obey those headers itself and link directly to the HTTPS version. What a great idea: all sites with sophisticated link sharing (where links are fetched to retrieve extracts and images for example) should do this as well. # 5th March 2018, 3:32 pm

Types

Years

Months

Tags