Interview with Facebook's Andrei Alexandrescu

Love his answer to #7 on what advice he'd give to a new developer:<p>"7. What advice would you give to a beginner server-side developer and what to an open-source author / contributor?<p>Meh, advice-shmadvice. Who am I to give advice? What’s experience good for in our field? I used to know how to write a keyboard driver and floppy disc formatters with non-standard densities. I’d be all but obsolete today if I hadn’t learned continuously.<p>Oh, so maybe this would be one piece of advice: learn how to learn, and stick with principles; mastering individual technologies will follow.<p>Technology is a great servant but a terrible master. The best people in our métier are those who know how to quickly become experts in some particular field."<p>Reminds me of Paul B's video from startup school:<p><a href="http://youtu.be/EZxP0i9ah8E" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/EZxP0i9ah8E</a>

Alexandrescu is a great programmer, and it's well worth heeding to his advice.<p>While reading "Modern C++" and being honestly horrified by the complexity of C++ and the way you have to fight the compiler and the language to get flexible code working, I was also mightily impressed by Alexandrescu's prowess. It's not hard to see how deeply he understands programming at the most basic level. His writing makes that book very pleasant to read.

I find it sad that he is asked to defend Facebook's decision to continue to use PHP. Given that Facebook is probably the largest website in the World now, the real question should be why other sites are not copying their software stack choices?<p>* edited for grammar.

&#62; To wit, our email and calendar software is off-the-shelf and is the most unpleasant tool to deal with. Get this – we have a few people “specialized” in sending large meeting invites out, because there are bugs that require peculiar expertise to work around. Not to mention that such invites come with “Do not accept from an iPhone lest you corrupt the invite for everyone!”<p>If only they used Google Apps :)

The post mentions concurrent hash tables for C++. Any ideas on which implementation they use? Or are they written in-house?

<p><pre><code> I wish I’d convince a serious hacker to bring things to the point where &#60;?d writeln("Hello, world!"); ?&#62; could be inserted in a web page. </code></pre> OMG!

Very nice interview. Although, I strongly oppose the style of interview questions he is vouching for when recruiting new employees at Facebook. I am a PhD student. I focus on parallel computing. I was interviewed by a company in Seattle. The interviewer asked me to write a function to convert from Decimal to Roman numbers. This was ridiculous. Not even once during the interview I was asked about my past experience or my research.