So what exactly do I do at Facebook?

13 April 2014

Obviously I often have to answer this question. If a colleague from the company asks me, I answer with just one word — TAO. Everybody knows TAO. If another software engineer asks me, it's easy to explain in one sentence — objects, associations, graph, cache. But if a normal person asks me, then it's not so obvious how to explain it clearly and concisely, and sometimes I've been caught unprepared. So I'm going to think of the answer and save it in cache... y'know...

I work on a system that aims to provide quick access to recent or popular data, for example profiles of people, posts, comments, friendships, likes, tags, etc.

Actually it wasn't so hard. Next step is to explain it to somebody who hasn't seen Facebook, for example, my grandma.