The Internet, The toast machine I can’t open up
Do you remember those days as a child, struggling to unscrewed the last screw holding some curious machine, breaking it apart just to get at what makes it tick? Slowly going through all the bits inside and trying to figure what it does and how it does it.
Well I don’t, I wasn’t much for breaking stuff apart. I opened a couple of remote controlled cars and found some gears and a motor, some electronics that seemed pointless, heh.
Now that I am a developer and have just graduated, settled into my job, the pressure is off my brain as much as it has been. It now gets the chance to wonder. So far it hasn’t wondered very far from work, but it’s getting there.
I am developing a social networking site for businesses. It is coming along nicely, seems like it shall scale fairly well and I’m happy with it’s progress. After solving the problems I have faced in terms of architecture and implementation I am curious how Facebook do it. I would love to see the database schema and walk the data relationships. Look at how and where they cache, generally a good poke at the top level stuff. The source code would be a little over the top as it would take a few weeks to wrap my head around it and at the end I wouldn’t have gained many answers.
I wish ya could rip off the lid and take a peak, see where all the wires go, which bit has the largest heat sink, which bit conditions the power, where all the logic is followed.
Open sourced software is where it is at in terms of ripping the lid off and peeking in. Though when you rip the lid of software all you get is a book with large words and no glossary.
What website’s would you like to peek inside of?
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In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: open source
on June 5, 2009 at 12:57 am
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You can peek under Facebook’s hood quite easily since they open sourced some of their stuff: http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php