Friday, June 10, 2011

TechWomen - Facebook TechTalk

As most of the people who know me, know, I've been selected to participate in the TechWomen program, a technical mentor-ship program at Silicon Valley, California initiated by the U.S department of state.

Today I can say that I've been here in the U.S for a week now, it's been full of excitement so far, however, some disappointments as well, in the area of the mentor-matching process and organizing things.. I would've been much better if mentors and mentees were introduced to each other ahead of time, and to have more sufficient time to prepare for the project instead of consuming time preparing for the project.

But some of the workshops we've been doing are really impressive, today we've been to a TechTalk at Facebook premises in PaloAlto, Silicon Valley, California.
Mike talked about how they had to optimize and come up with a new version of PHP in order to increase performance and server utilization efficiency, and then they opened-source this version under the name of HipHop for PHP.

That was the most exciting part to me, among all the other technical things that Mike talked about, and Tim also talked about how it is to work at Facebook, was really impressive how they can still be "in control" with all this flexibility given to employees, I tried to think about it and because we had limited time for questions (and I already asked 3 questions), I didn't get the chance to ask how exactly could Facebook still stay in control with the productivity of the employees with all this flexibility given to them, but then i guess i figured out that it most probably relies on the fact that Facebook only hires the best engineers, those who are eager to get things done, those who actually "eat" code as they say, I like that.. & I've been starving for "such" a code since a very long time now.. yum yum

Lesson of the day: "Move fast & break things. Fail, fail harder. Be BOLD. What will you do if you weren't afraid? Done is better than Perfect" - a combination of Facebook philosophical quotes, taken from the TechTalk today at Facebook premises

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