Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community
212 points by electrum 2 years ago | 62 comments- biztos 2 years ago> Engineers at these highly competitive companies must create memorable work, or they will not get the promotions they deserve.
If everybody gets promoted because of "memorable" work, maybe nobody actually deserves the promotions, and they're just handed out at the whim of whoever remembers your work?
- dan-robertson 2 years agoI think memorable just means that there is some artefact of the work, eg some thing in the user interface or some committed code or report or whatever.
- biztos 2 years agoMy issue was with "deserve." But yeah, I get that sometimes you've got to burn to shine.
- biztos 2 years ago
- langsoul-com 2 years agoMore like if it isn't documented, then it doesn't exist type deal.
Pretty common in companies these days, I suppose big companies just turn it up to 11.
- dan-robertson 2 years ago
- bitsondatadev 2 years agoI'm curious to know if this is anyone's first time hearing about Trino?
- biztos 2 years agoI had heard of Presto, vaguely, but not Trino.
It's certainly an interesting choice of name!
Should you say "TRY-no" to rhyme with Rhino or "TREE-no" to rhyme with Arduino?
I would do the latter, but I'm a debauched expat. My guess is that half the people in America will do the former.
Because I overthink this stuff I had to go see what's on trino.com and it's an impressively old-school unfinished personal website.
- bitsondatadev 2 years agoThe latter tree-no like neutrino and the website is https://trino.io lol.
- biztos 2 years agoI knew that was the website, because I RTFA, but when I see they don't have the .com I always wonder why, what's there, is there another Trino making drone-bombs for the Ministry of Offense, or is it maybe some dude who likes to play the Ukulele, also a word with varying pronunciation? Oo or You?
So we have one vote for tree-no, it's a start! With me, that's two!
- biztos 2 years ago
- bitsondatadev 2 years ago
- MonkeyMalarky 2 years agoNot trino, but yes for Presto. But it was already confusing because there are/were two Presto projects with one being a fork of the other?
- bitsondatadev 2 years agoYeah, I think that was one of the reasons why Facebook enforcing the trademark ended up being a blessing in disguise. It at least made the forks clearer. Now Trino is gaining more momentum but it takes a while for the brand recognition to set in I suppose.
- bawolff 2 years agoNot to mention the name of the opera rendering engine.
- bitsondatadev 2 years ago
- x3n0ph3n3 2 years agoI'm actually one of their customers.
- 37 2 years agoSo it's not data collection (similar to Google Analytics), just the query part?
- x3n0ph3n3 2 years agoWe use it to query data across multiple data sources, e.g. Elasticsearch, AWS Redshift, and S3.
- bitsondatadev 2 years agoIt’s a query engine that can talk to multiple databases and run join queries across tables from multiple sources. It also runs as a faster alternative to Hive.
- x3n0ph3n3 2 years ago
- 37 2 years ago
- mr_toad 2 years agoLots of people using Athena have probably never heard of Presto, let alone Trino.
- bitsondatadev 2 years agoYup, I would say Athena is the most commonly used version of Trino/Presto out there.
Also, if anyone is reading this wondering which version Athena comes from, it's a release that was common to both Presto and Trino before the fork. However, more recently we've worked with the Athena team on getting the newer Trino features that aren't in Presto today in Athena. So it's starting to become more based on Trino.
- bitsondatadev 2 years ago
- zem 2 years agonever heard of it, but i'm not in their target audience. seems like it's focused on big data.
- thatguy0900 2 years agoI've never heard of it. Im not a programmer, though I read hacker news daily.
- biztos 2 years ago
- cmrdporcupine 2 years ago"Feedback from these engineers ultimately culminated in the managers making the decision to give automatic contributor rights to any Facebook engineer working on Presto, so that these engineers could move faster."
I'm confused -- does Facebook not have similar code review infrastructure as Google, etc. That is: nothing -- I mean nothing -- gets "contributed" at Google without it going through code review.
Were FB engineers able to commit directly without review? Or is it that they were given some kind of "owners" privilege to fast track reviews? This all sounds bad.
- bitsondatadev 2 years agoFacebook has their own internal reviews for their own internal projects and forks of open source projects. I think the issue came down to Facebook adding anyone working on the project to have the ability to merge code to the open source project.
Typically if a company wants to contribute to open source, you have to create a PR and have it be reviewed and merged by the maintainers of the open source project on top of internal review. Facebook management decided to circumvent that process.
- radicality 2 years agoI spent many years at FB, but no longer there, but that doesn’t even sound like a ‘special case’? Every engineer at Fb has access to pretty much all the code, and after an internal code review for your code change, you can get it committed to the internal repos. For open source things, something syncs the external and internal changes ocassionaly I think. I imagine the problem here was that now external people can’t comment on internal PRs etc.
I even remember some of my internal commits making it into FBs open source code on GitHub, even though at the time I had no idea that this specific area of FBs codebase is open source.
- billjings 2 years agoI worked at FB, too, and I can confirm you speak the truth.
This process is problematic, though. The "special case" is the standard process at FB: to make external contributors second class citizens.
They have their reasons, but doing this pushes the locus of discussion and action to the place where work happens fastest: inside the company. That means that the interests of FB engineers drive the project; in other words, not open.
That argument is I'm sure open to some logical nitpicking. But the evidence speaks for itself: Facebook open source projects aren't responsive to the outside community, and they language when FB's priorities shift. So their strategy has been pennywise, pound foolish in my view: they get the short term benefits of an "open" project, but they're incapable of actually being good open source custodians.
- billjings 2 years ago
- radicality 2 years ago
- kmonsen 2 years agoFacebook/Meta does not have owners, so any two people in the company can land a change.
- benreesman 2 years agoAnd one engineer can (or could in 2018) put the unix name of the person sitting next to them in the "Reviewed By:" field and force push something, but it isn't/wasn't The Done Thing outside of the most extreme 3am SEV-0 scenarios.
Any two people are in a less-extreme but similar boat: if someone puts up a bad diff and someone without a stake in the code accepts it, they had better hope to hell nothing goes wrong.
SEV review is a remarkably enlightened process for what it is, but you do not want to sit there explaining to extreme-seniority people why you YOLO'd something into Presto without buy in from a Presto hacker with your manager sitting behind you already thinking about how much this is going to get harped on in calibration.
The `OWNERS` file at FB is in `hg log`, but it's there.
- eru 2 years agoIf I remember right, Google also had a mechanism for pushing something through outside of normal review. But it was something more disciplined than just faking a review by putting your co-workers name in a reviewed-by field.
Because it was more disciplined, those commits could be automatically marked for later review.
- zeroonetwothree 2 years agoI believe you cannot force push anymore.
- eru 2 years ago
- avalys 2 years agoFor a long time, it was worse than that - once a change was "accepted", you could amend the commit with changes to literally any other file in the entire monorepo, and land it without any further review.
They finally added a "final review" step to ensure that someone eventually takes a look at these changes after the initial accept, but that still occurs several days after the commit.
- toast0 2 years agoCan you still add
Reviewed-by: yourself
in the commit message to skip review? That was my favorite one.
- toast0 2 years ago
- benreesman 2 years ago
- dsundstrom 2 years agoWe ran Presto directly on Github (I think it still does), so everything went directly to the project without a private internal review first. We designed it this way, so that everyone in the community could participate in the full process.
- micromacrofoot 2 years agoThere's code review, and there's "code review" where there's a deadline and someone says "can you click approve on this real quick," which is essentially a direct contribution with a compliance dance. I've seen it at large companies like these on several occasions.
- zip1234 2 years agoAs far as I know nobody can just make changes unilaterally without another engineer's approval.
- bitsondatadev 2 years ago
- nineinchnick 2 years agoI love seeing there are people dedicated to keeping open-source projects like Trino alive, ready to make some hard decisions.
- robertlagrant 2 years agoFacebook gave them the time and support to create a potential career-making product that they knew best, and could separate off at any time. They'd be crazy not to take advantage of that gift.
- haimez 2 years agoI’m personally pretty curious to see what those contribution statistics look like if you exclude starburst employees.
- nineinchnick 2 years agoYou can check which companies contribute PRs here: https://ossinsight.io/analyze/trinodb/trino
- nineinchnick 2 years ago
- robertlagrant 2 years ago
- simpligility 2 years agoJust a quick follow up .. here is some of the innovation that happened in the project in the last decade - https://trino.io/blog/2022/08/04/decade-innovation.html
- ruler88 2 years agowhy did Presto got renamed to Trino? so confusing...
- bitsondatadev 2 years agoHere's the renaming article that clarifies this...
https://trino.io/blog/2020/12/27/announcing-trino.html
Months after this consolidation, Facebook decided to create a competing community using The Linux Foundation®. As a first action, Facebook applied for a trademark on Presto®. This was a surprising, norm-breaking move because up until that point, the Presto® name had been used without constraints by commercial and non-commercial products for over 6 years. In September of 2019, Facebook established the Presto Foundation at The Linux Foundation®, and immediately began working to enforce this new trademark. We spent the better part of the last year trying to agree to terms with Facebook and The Linux Foundation that would not negatively impact the community, but unfortunately we were unable to do so. The end result is that we must now change the name in a short period of time, with little ability to minimize user disruption.
- neilv 2 years agoAccording to https://trino.io/blog/2020/12/27/announcing-trino.html , because of trademark registration and enforcement by Facebook.
(IMHO, PrestoSQL also looked maybe a little too much like PostgreSQL in this space.)
I'm imagining an unusually efficient brandstorming session. "OK, folks, idea hats on, there are no bad ideas... we've got Presto..." "Uh... new Presto... New-o..." "Neutrino..." "Trino?" "Trino!" "Searching it now!"
- dsundstrom 2 years agoIf only it were that easy. It took ages to find the new name. There is a Google doc somewhere with pages of bad names.
- bitsondatadev 2 years agoHah! It may have very well looked like that given the time constraints they were working with.
- dsundstrom 2 years ago
- CydeWeys 2 years agoThis is answered in the linked article.
- bitsondatadev 2 years ago
- langsoul-com 2 years agoSame problem occurs for consulting companies as well. You may get a big company, but they would exhaust all your time and attention, demanding changes that only benefit them.
Although, in this case it was code changes and features that only suited Fb
- difflens 2 years agoMaybe I'm just being cynical here, but did leaving Meta facilitate the creation of Starburst enterprise based on open source Trino?
- bitsondatadev 2 years agoStarburst employee here so take my view for what it’s worth. A few points:
Starburst spun out from some contributors working on Teradata’s Presto distro in 2017.
The Presto creators left Facebook in late 2018 and worked on building the new community and fork for most of 2019. They joined Starburst around a year later.
I asked these same questions in my last company and it seems like nothing was correlated between starburst and the new fork. After talking with Martin T. (One of the creators of Presto) about it and a few other long time contributors and my concerns went away.
I ultimately started to contribute to Trino and over the years I’ve only seen a community dedicated to making a successful query engine. You can see that by the activity and growth of the project.
Feel free to remain a skeptic but the best way to know is joint the community and make your own assumptions. :)
- bitsondatadev 2 years ago
- password4321 2 years agoTIL or xkcd.com/1053 "lucky 10,000'd":
> Presto, a distributed SQL query engine for big data analytics
> we were forced to rebrand and changed the name to Trino