Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattnewton | Hacker News Reader

As an ex-fang engineer myself, I have never advocated for more services, usually have pushed for unifying repos and multiple build targets on the same codebase. I am forever chasing the zen of google3 the way I remember it.

If anything my sin has been forgetting how much engineering went into supporting the monorepo at Google and duo-repo at Facebook when advocating for it.

View on HN

Do FAANG engineers normally advocate for more services instead of fewer? I haven't gotten that impression.

Smaller services but not necessarily more binaries.

The current direction I think is to build composable services that could be run together or separately.

Where a service is a logical grouping of an RPC interface.

Here is some public work in this direction from Google

https://serviceweaver.dev/

Makes sense, since Google uses a monorepo (google3).

Normally more services and fewer repos.

From my experience.

There seems to be more interest in building monorepo support now. Some tools, start ups, etc. I would bet Github is working on increasing support as well for large repos. So I think Google was ahead of the curve there.

What were the two facebook repos? I can't find any reference to them.

The main ones were www which contained most of the PHP code and fbcode which contained most of the other backend services. There were actually separate repos for the mobile apps also.

Fbcode then became fbsource when it acquired the android and some data code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com