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Summary: Ref T988. Divides documentation into four books: - User: Install, configure and use Phabricator. - Contrib: Develop and contribute to Phabricator. - Flavor: Worldly advice. - Generated: Generated technical documentation. Test Plan: Generated the books and got sensible results. See screenshots. Reviewers: chad, btrahan Reviewed By: btrahan CC: chad, aran Maniphest Tasks: T988 Differential Revision: https://secure.phabricator.com/D8414
60 lines
3.2 KiB
Text
60 lines
3.2 KiB
Text
@title Phabricator Project History
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@group lore
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A riveting tale of adventure. In this document, I refer to worldly and
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sophisticated engineer Evan Priestley as "I", which is only natural as I am he.
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This document is mostly just paragraph after paragraph of self-aggrandizement.
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= In The Beginning =
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I wrote the original version of Differential in one night at a Facebook
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Hackathon in April or May 2007, along with Luke Shepard. I joined the company in
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April and code review was already an established and mostly-mandatory part of
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the culture, but it happened over email and was inefficient and hard to keep
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track of. I remember feeling like I was spending a lot of time waiting for code
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review to happen, which was a major motivator for building the tool.
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The original name of the tool was "Diffcamp". Some time earlier there had been
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an attempt to create a project management tool that was a sort of hybrid between
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Trac and Basecamp called "Traccamp". Since we were writing the code review tool
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at the height of the brief popularity Traccamp enjoyed, we integrated and called
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the new tool Diffcamp even though it had no relation to Basecamp. Traccamp fell
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by the wayside shortly thereafter and was eventually removed.
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However, Diffcamp didn't share its fate. We spent some more time working on it
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and got good enough to win hearts and minds over emailing diffs around and was
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soon the de facto method of code review at Facebook.
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= The Long Bloat =
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For the next two and a half years, Diffcamp grew mostly organically and gained a
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number of features like inline commenting, CLI support and git support (Facebook
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was 100% SVN in early 2007 but 90%+ of Engineers worked primarily in git with
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SVN bridging by 2010). As these patches were contributed pretty much randomly,
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it also gained a lot of performance problems, usability issues, and bugs.
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Through 2007 and 2008 I worked mostly on frontend and support infrastructure;
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among other things, I wrote a static resource management system called Haste. In
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2009 I worked on the Facebook Lite site, where I built the Javelin Javascript
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library and an MVC-flavored framework called Alite.
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But by early 2010, Diffcamp was in pretty bad shape. Two years of having random
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features grafted onto it without real direction had left it slow and difficult
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to use. Internal feedback on the tool was pretty negative, with a lot of
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complaints about performance and stability. The internal XTools team had made
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inroads at fixing these problems in late 2009, but they were stretched thin and
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the tool had become a sprawling landscape of architectural and implementation
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problems.
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= Differential =
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I joined the new Dev Tools team around February 2010 and took over Diffcamp. I
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renamed it to Differential, moved it to a new Alite-based infrastructure with
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Javelin, and started making it somewhat less terrible. I eventually wrote
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Diffusion and build Herald to replace a very difficult-to-use predecessor. These
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tools were less negatively received than the older versions. By December 2010 I
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started open sourcing them; Haste became //Celerity// and Alite became
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//Aphront//. I wrote Maniphest to track open issues with the project in January
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or February and we open sourced Phabricator in late April, shortly after I left
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Facebook.
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