Mark Rober has turned into very content-driven since a few years ago. He used to spend more time on explaining how the science works. His “toys” are also copycat from existing competitors

Music on the other hand is so strange and different. I knew the big 4 tried again and again in 2000s to offer form of music store but failed. Since none of the existing large music streaming services (YT. apple, Spotify) license, labels are happy to hand them licensing agreements.

Very much just tables, div no fancy icons, no fancy fonts. Not a lot of images to render. I like that.

Facebook’s on the other hand, I wouldn’t say fancier, they have a consistent internal design UI components, I can tell you they look less “mature” than Google’s. I really don’t have a word for that but just think like “bootstrap” feel.

But Python? I hate the testing setup. We have a mono repo, while not as big as meta’s, full discovery eats cpu. So we had to tweak our settings, per team, to only discover team specific dirs. Also, there is no way to kill a running test (at least no obvious shortcut or button-wtf)

Having been at facebook prior led me to believe that we can definitely 2x productivity if tools made by these large organizations are open sourced and maintained.

I will probably write my thoughts like the author (if anyone cares), but the bottom line is I consistently find many existing open source projects missing critically useful features and/or don’t focus as much on real developer productivity (I admit that can be very subjective).

Eg Bazle is fantastic when it works (all deps are accounted for) but it is not unusual to find github comments that tell users to add patches because the maintainers (core and contrib) haven’t fixed the problems (some over 2-3 years old) or because they hardcode a version of Go….

Another example is VS Code. facebook (now meta) offered everyone to its heavily extended VS Code. While I didn’t use that as much since I am a terminal and a Vim developer, now that I use VS Code almost daily at work for writing Go, I really do appreciate the customization facebook engineers did - because too often someone (both engineers and non-engineers) would come to us and complain about some issues with the built-in git UI, trying to figure out how to construct a working workspace settings, switching between git and arcanist. The facebook’s version had all this figured out really nicely. With minimal training someone could submit code very quickly without ever touching the terminal.

I can go on and talk about how awesome ods is compared to prometheus and its query UI. Finally, I miss Scuba too (and Honeycomb founders were involved building Scuba).

Sure, facebook tools don’t always work and there are issues and bugs like any software, but overall I felt more productive.

Maybe it is because I did’t maintain them - now I do as a full time engineer at work, I feel the pains. But then again, if google and facebook maintain these as open source would be really nice.

Nobody deploys a textbook algorithm because everyone knows textbooks algorithms and there are no advantages. So, no, there is real value in learning the fundamentals, dear founder.