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Comment by zekenie | Hacker News Reader

So do you have to use python to work with this? That's probably a stupid question because clearly facebook's using all kinds of tech on the backend. I'm trying to see how you'd integrate this into a rails or node project...

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Found the answer to my question on the readme: "The implementation here mirrors many of the key components of Facebook's PHP implementation of PlanOut which is used to conduct experiments with hundreds of millions of users."

I tried to build the python version of PlanOut with portability in mind. It took only a few minutes to port the base class that does all the hashing from PHP to Python. The the interpreter + a few core operators took about two hours. Developing the Experiment and Namespace classes to work in a way that we were happy with took a lot more time. I suspect that if you knew node / js, and just wanted to do a direct port, it shouldn't be too hard.

We have a little more background on the project at: http://facebook.github.io/planout/docs/about-planout.html and I'd be happy to review any ports to other frameworks.

Does Facebook use this system to turn on new features for a certain subset of the user base to test those features out, or is this mainly for A/B testing existing features?

PlanOut has been used both for evaluating the effects of new product rollouts / encouragements and for more scientific experiments that look at the effects of existing features. You may want to check out Section 4 of the PlanOut paper at: http://facebook.com/publications/563103330455476/

Awesome, thanks! We'd have to port it to rails to use it at work. Right now we're using much more primitive AB testing.

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