Robert Johnson

Director, Engineering, Facebook

Robert Johnson

Facebook changes almost every day.  As one of the world's most popular websites, this fast release cycle helps the product evolve continuously in order to keep pleasing its growing customer base.  It also creates many challenges for the engineering team that must see to it that performance keeps pace.  Robert Johnson gives a fascinating glimpse into the strategy, tools and culture that enables Facebook to keep maintaining its scale.

One pillar of the Facebook approach is a habit of frequent, small changes.  Almost by definition, adding new code brings new bugs and performance hits.  When something goes wrong, it's much easier to figure out the reason when changes are incremental. The very fast pace of many small changes can make it hard to pay attention to everything, but Johnson's team has built a set of tools and practices that help alert them to issues in different ways.  

Along with various technical approaches to optimize page loading, Johnson says it's crucial to get the right organizational culture.  If a highly motivated performance team is too centralized, they will be too far removed from the code itself, and saying "no" may become their only way to exert control. If the responsibility for performance becomes too decentralized, it's hard to sustain the necessary passion since not everyone will care.   According to Johnson, balance is the key. 


Robert Johnson is Director of Engineering at Facebook, where he leads the software development efforts to cost-effectively scale Facebook’s infrastructure and optimize performance for its many millions of users. During his time with the company, the number of users has expanded by more than fifty-fold and Facebook now handles billions of page views a day.

Robert was previously at ActiveVideo Networks where he led the distributed systems and set-top software development teams. He has worked in a wide variety of engineering roles from robotics to embedded systems to web software. He received a B.S. In Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech.

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