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Sources:

http://framethink.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/how-facebook-ships-code/
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f3u0n/how_facebook_ships_code/c1d3b37
http://www.quora.com/What-kind-of-automated-testing-does-Facebook-do/answer/Steven-Grimm 

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RTFM:

Demonstration:

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snow.mov Watch on Posterous

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Enjoy bowsing the layered human body! But before anything else please install Firefox 4 beta to get a WebGL compatible browser.

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Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.

Paul Graham

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• Mustache templating language: Although this template engine is not very concise, its strength is that it can be used on the client-side as well as the server-side. 
• jQuery: Do I really need to introduce this one? ;-)
• LabJS: Parallel loading of javascript resources that make your page load faster. Here is a benchmark to show you the potential improvements.
• Modernizr: Detects if specific HTML5 features are present.
• JSON-P: (JSON with Padding) is a workaround for the Ajax cross domain problem. It exploits the idea that you can dynamically create a new <script> linked to an external resource to fetch external data. More explanations here and here.
• oEmbed: Format to turn an URL that points to a rich data (e.g., image, video, ...) into structured meta-data (dimensions, author, title, etc.). This is ideal to embed the rich data on your site.

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At Amazon, when designing new products they work backwards from the customer until they get the minimum set of features that will satisfy the customer problem. The benefit of the method is to avoid overbuilding things.

Here is the Working Backwards process as defined here and here: 

1. Start by writing the Press Release. Describes in a simple way what the product does and why it exists - what are the features and benefits. It needs to be very clear and to the point. One page max. Here is the outline:
     Heading - Name the product in a way the reader (i.e. your target customers) will understand. 
     Sub-Heading - Describe who the market for the product is and what benefit they get. One sentence only underneath the title.
     Summary - Give a summary of the product and the benefit. Assume the reader will not read anything else so make this paragraph good.
     Problem - Describe the problem your product solves.
     Solution - Describe how your product elegantly solves the problem.


2. Write a Frequently Asked Questions document. Includes questions that came up during the press release creation and questions that other folks asked when you shared the press release.


3. Define the customer experience. Mockups of each screen that the customer uses. The goal here is to tell stories of how a customer is solving their problems using the product.


4. Write the User Manual. Three sections: concepts, how-to, and reference, which between them tell the customer everything they need to know to use the product.

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Imagine the worst case scenario with your webapp: someone infiltates your system and is able to steal your database and all its sensitive data like passwords! Are you using MongoDB and Node.js? You're probably wondering what's the best solution as MongoDB currently has no solution to hash passwords automatically. Anyway you certainly want to avoid any of these automatic helpers; just do a quick google search for "cracking mysql password" and you'll get convinced ;-)

An interesting solution is coming from Paul Buchheit's blog, which proposes to use the bcrypt library to compute salted-hashes instead of weak MD5/SHA-1 ones or worst plaintext passwords.

There is a bcrypt javascript port on github tailored for node. The core of the library is in C and uses libbsd so you have to use the node-waf utility provided with node to compile it. Here are the commands on Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install libbsd-dev; cd node.bcrypt.js; node-waf configure; node-waf build; Everything should work fine, but in case something is going wrong, here are the different setup commands I've had to write in my particular system config to make this work:

• I added a link in the node directory to make node-waf work correctly:
  cd node/lib; ln -s ../tool node;
• The wscript used by node-waf in the node.bcrypt.js directory was missing node include path:
  ../node/src ../node/deps/v8/include/ ../node/deps/libev/ ../node/deps/libeio/
• Finally to require the bcrypt lib from my app I added an index.js file in the root directory of node.bcrypt.js, which contains:
  var bcrypt_lib = require('./bcrypt_lib'); module.exports = new bcrypt_lib.BCrypt();

Congrats! You can now enjoy robust hashing!

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I hope these comments are still funny out of context :-)

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