MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS: LESSONS FROM FACEBOOK'S EARLY ENGINEERING CULTURE

Summary from the TLDR Marketing newsletter

Facebook's early motto reflects a tradeoff where speed requires tolerance for imperfection. The company built systems that accepted this cost in order to move quickly. It set a Day 1 pace through Bootcamp, which pushed new engineers to ship code to users by the end of Day 2 and gave them full access to the codebase so they could contribute immediately. It celebrated fast execution through blameless postmortems, impact-focused reviews, and frequent hackathons that produced major products such as Messenger and the Like button. It also paired speed with strong recovery practices through chaos engineering, feature flags, and disaster drills so broken things could be fixed fast.