[exclipy]

I jumped from Google to Facebook on 2019 and while I had thought Google had best in industry developer tooling, Facebook had it better.

Google’s dinky browser based Cider was cute but Facebook in its transition from Atom to VS Code was far ahead. Google might have invented asynchronous web based code review with Mondrian and Critique, but Facebook’s Diff was better with its stacked diff support. Google’s Buganizer was outdated and clunky compared to Facebook’s Tasks.

I left Facebook the year after but I do wonder where Meta’s tooling is up to nowadays. Is it still a glimpse of the future?

[kccqzy]

I have never worked at Facebook but I have always thought of Critique as the best code review tool I’ve used. It’s way better than GitHub. A few things I miss: (1) it has convenient and intuitive pure-keyboard navigation; (2) you can reply to code review comments in a pending form and then publish them after you update your code, because in the common case you address code review comments by updating the code; (3) until recently GitHub wouldn’t allow you to comment on lines far away from the changed lines but Critique has always allowed it, because obviously this is an important use case when the reviewer needs to point out the changed code affects some other regions; (4) it had support for diffbase so it displayed stacked CLs fine.

Critique had had a redesign between end of 2019 / start of 2020. I didn’t recall adding any significant features but it merely modernized the UI. So did Buganizer and Code Search. So if you thought the UI was clunky well it had been addressed.

Buganizer UI: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues?q=Android%2F

Code Search UI: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a public instance of Critique.

[exclipy]

Oh yeah, not to mention the drag and drop GUI mercurial client in the IDE. I still haven’t seen anything as good on the outside.

Regular engineers could use stacked diffs proficiently and regularly, without it being seen as a super advanced 10x engineer power user thing.

[cmrdporcupine]

I left Google end of 2022, but we already had the mentioned new version of Cider based on VS Code for a few years before that. It's possible FB did it first, but I don't think Google was far behind at all. I'm fairly certain there was the new VSCode based Cider by early 2020. Certainly was by end of 2020 and entirely common by the time I left.

(I didn't get to use it much because I worked on embedded stuff that was on the Chromium stack and in git, not in Google3)

Buganizer (v1 and v2) was delightfully primitive and simple. That was the point. PMs couldn't play games with it.

[surajrmal]

There is enough flow of engineers between the two companies that many of the things Facebook has done better have been copied by Google. I think in many ways it goes both ways.

[shaftway]

I jumped from Google to Meta in 2022 (Worst. Timing. Ever.) and by that time Google's IDE had pretty much caught up. Android app development at Meta was super painful because of the repo size. My good morning routine was to kick off a 40 minute sync, and then get coffee and wander the building while I waited.

[exclipy]

And the instant start cloud dev servers complete with shareable full stack preview links! Chefs kiss