Facebook Seattle Engineering Road Show: Mike Shroepfer on Engineering at Scale at Facebook

Interesting discussion by Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo about Facebook's architecture which services 200+ million users.

There are three key mantras that describe Facebook’s engineering culture

1. Move Fast and Break Things – The company encourages people to take risks and innovate
   even at the risk of jeopardizing the stability of the site. It is important to them
   to not become risk averse because this is often the downfall of companies as they
   grow.

2. Huge Impact with Small Teams – Most features and underlying systems on the site are
   built by teams of one to three people. They have a metric of users per developers
   that they are particularly proud. They claim that at Facebook they have 1 developer
   for every 1.2 million users which is better than most industry leaders including Google
   (1 developer per 190,000 users), Amazon (1 developer per 96,000 users) and Microsoft
   (1 developer per 75,000). [Ed. Note – not to be defensive but this metric seems
   weird to me and it wasn’t clear how it is calculated. ]

3. Be Bold and Innovative – self explanatory