Eugene Letuchy

One of the things I like most about working at Facebook is the ability to launch products that are (almost) immediately used by millions of people. Unlike a three-guys-in-a-garage startup, we don't have the luxury of scaling out infrastructure to keep pace with user growth; when your feature's userbase will go from 0 to 70 million practically overnight, scalability has to be baked in from the start. The project I'm currently working on, Facebook Chat, offered a nice set of software engineering challenges. Real-time presence notification The most resource-intensive operation performed in a chat system is not sending messages. It is rather keeping each online user aware of the online-idle-offline states of their friends, so that conversations can begin. The naive implementat... (more)