Behind the scenes of Facebook’s engineering team

Rolling out daily feature updates to 800 million users worldwide is no easy task — just ask Facebook’s release engineering team. Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul just published an epic look behind the scenes of Facebook’s constant stream of feature rollouts. The report digs into the nitty gritty of development at the company, diving into its internal IRC server, its BitTorrent code deployment system, and the company’s custom transpiler called HipHop that converts PHP into optimized C++ code. There are also some cool details about how Facebook tests new product — every Facebook employee uses a beta version of the site at all times that includes a special Debug tool for finding and patching holes in the site. If you’re into web development or just want to know a bit about Facebook’s backend, Ars Technica’s report is definitely worth a read.