durhamg
Joined 2 years ago
Karma
61
Submissions
4
Member since
Mar 8
Recent submissions
Comment · 18 days ago
As the longest serving and most senior member (now ex-member) of the Facebook source control team, I had no problem with your post. I'm just happy to see the ideas and technology helping move the industry forward.
Comment · 8 months ago
This sounds exactly like Claude wrote it. I've noticed Claude saying "genuinely" a lot lately, and the "real killer feature" segue just feels like Claude being asked to review something.
Comment · 1 year ago
I made a planetoid Minecraft demo back in the day, but I left the planet as a cube. Each cube had a defined gravity direction, so you could rig it so that no matter what face you were on, gravity pointed "down". Having gravity be a customizable per cube allowed for cool things like having the center of the planet have reversed gravity, so if you dug too deep you'd find a cavern and could walk on the inner surface of the planet , effectively upside down. Or you could have two planets near each other and build upwards until you entered the others gravity well. I also added portals, so you could even jump through a portal fast enough to get thrown up to a neighbouring planet.
Obligatory awkward demo: https://youtu.be/PDZGzL4GRF0?si=K9vfMhbcg5Vvd1_A
Comment · 2 years ago
The overall performance was massively better. Operations that would take minutes in Git in a large repo would take seconds (and eventually sub-seconds) in Facebook's Mercurial. Latency was a common complaint though. With Git in a small repo, commands can finish in milliseconds. With Facebook's Mercurial most commands took at least a few hundreds milliseconds (Python startup and module initialization alone could take that), which makes the CLI feel more sluggish than most people preferred.
Beyond performance, a lot of design effort was put into the workflows as well. The resulting user experience is significantly different from the open source Mercurial experience and in the long run the vast majority of people preferred the new workflows. Even some of the die-hard Git fans who complained about the transition. Part of the motivation of open sourcing Sapling was because ex-employees wanted to use it outside the company.
(Source: I was on the Facebook source control team for ten years.)