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Facebook now updates its code twice every day

The social-networking giant has hundreds of developers pushing new code to the service every week.

Emil Protalinski
2 min read
Facebook

Facebook announced today it is doubling the site's release speed to shipping new code twice per day. The push is driven by Facebook's New York office as well as the social network's daily push already managed by its California release engineering team.

As Facebook grows towards 1 billion monthly active users and beyond, maintaining and frequently improving the site is a must. The company's hacker mentality of "move fast and break things" definitely applies here.

"We're making this change to keep our release process as quick and efficient at 1,000 engineers as it was at 100," release engineering manager Chuck Rossi said in a statement. "I'm really looking forward to this change as it takes our already incredibly aggressive release process and doubles down on it, offering us twice the opportunity to ship great things. It's exciting and I think it crushes what anyone else of our size and impact is doing. Ship early and ship twice as often."

Facebook started pushing code once a day back in May 2011. Rossi says Facebook developers are now producing six times the amount of code per week as they were in January 2008, when he left Google for the social networking giant.

Facebook may be fast at updating its main Web site, but the same definitely cannot be said for its mobile division. The social-networking giant needs to significantly improve its apps for Android and iOS if it wants to "crush what anyone else its size and impact is doing" in mobile.