Facebook and Open Source — David Recordon interview. HipHop really embodies how we create at Facebook. It started as a hackathon project by Haiping Zhao, who was later joined by Iain Proctor and Minghui Yang. Haiping noticed a number of similarities between the syntax of PHP and C++, and wondered if you could programmatically rewrite one into another. Two-and-half years and a few other engineers later, HipHop was serving the vast majority of Facebook’s production traffic. It takes our PHP source code, transforms it into C++, and compiles it into a self-contained binary that we deploy on production web servers.
d3 — a small Javascript library for manipulating documents based on data. You use CSS and HTML5 candy to style marked-up data into visualizations. (via Mike Olson)
Crowdsourced is Not Open-Sourced (Simon Phipps) — they are very different, most importantly in the ownership of the outcome. An important point, one worth chewing over for a while.
