The person who paid $70,000 to tour Facebook might have been trying to get some insight into how the company works.
Hopefully, that person read the walls.
When visiting Facebook, it’s impossible not to notice the motivational posters peppered throughout the building. They seem to be there to remind Facebook developers to keep thinking like a startup, even as the company grows.
Some of the principles on display:
Fail harder
Move fast and break things
Proceed and be bold
Done is better than perfect
This is in line with Facebook’s culture, where engineers have incredible freedom to choose which projects they work on, and can even switch jobs for a month to avoid burnout.
Meanwhile, some clever prankster made a funny change to this message on the fridge in one of the cafeterias (where the company holds some of its press conferences):
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No, this isn’t some kind of carnival pitch. It’s a new product offering from Mu Dynamics called blitz.io that allows developers building in the cloud to load test their apps for as little as a buck. With blitz.io Mu Dynamics, which has a product for ISPs that shows them how 1 million people downloading Netflix or playing FarmVille might affect their networks, is branching out into the cloud sector.
Kowsik Guruswamy, the CTO of Mu Dynamics, said today that the company realized there was an opportunity to take what it calls its blitz infrastructure used to test how apps will affect ISPs’ networks and offer load testing for developers building in the cloud. For a detailed look at how Mu built the blitz platform, check out Guruswamy’s post here. Friday, Mu said it could offer developers an hour of testing time on the Heroku platform for just $1. (It has other pricing plans as well.)
So now, developers using the Heroku or Red Hat Platforms-as-a-Service can deploy their apps and use Blitz.io to terrorize them with hits to see how well they scale. Developers get back results that tell them how many hits their app can handle. And because this is a simple and cheap test to run, they can do it as often as they want, trying it out after they upload new code or just running it over and over again as the develop tries to optimize an aspect of the application.
Calling the current way of building apps for the web or mobile devices one of “continuous deployment, Guruswamy says the iterative (and cheap) approach offered by the Blitz platform works with the way people are building out apps. It used to take six months to build an app and a month to test it, but that’s not as relevant to an entirely new crop of developers that are building on various clouds. It’s a point emphasized by the emergence of several startups such as Parse or Kinvey that are offering a variety of back-end or development services to speed up the process of building out new mobile apps or web services.
And for those thinking how it might be awesome to prank your fellow Y Combinator buddies by spending a buck to test out their app on the sly, Guruswamy says the company makes you prove the app you want to load test belongs to you. He expects to launch service for new platforms on an ongoing basis, so if your PaaS isn’t there yet, it may be soon.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Loozrboy.
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