CS50 Lecture by Mark Zuckerberg - 7 December 2005

What people said

alpine01 · 2025-10 · Recommendation

There's a now famous Harvard lecture video on YouTube of Zuckerberg earlier in the Facebook days, where he walks through the issues they hit early on. [VIDEO] I watched it ages ago, but I seem to remember one thing that I liked was that each time they changed the architecture, it was to solve a problem they had, or were beginning to have. They seemed to be staying away from pre-optimization and instead took the approach of tackling problems as they had as they appeared, rather than imagining problems long before/if they occurred. It's a bit like the "perfect is the enemy of done" concept - you could spend 2-3x the time making it much more scalable, but that might have an opportunity cost which weakens you somewhere else or makes it harder/more expensive to maintain and support. Take it with a pinch of salt, but I thought it seemed like quite a good level-headed approach to choosing how to spend time/money early on, when there's a lot of financial/time constraints.

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syspec · 2022-02 · Recommendation

It's easy to poke fun at Mark because he's mega rich and can come off a little stiff, but he's pretty interesting to listen when he's speaking without a script. Here's Mark when he was 21 giving a lecture at Harvard's CS50: [VIDEO]

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paulsutter · 2022-07 · Reference

But what happens if a company chooses truly the worst language. Like PHP? Oh, right. That was Facebook. They ALSO ran circles around their competitors and crushed them. I hear they are worth /even more/ than Viaweb! Great PHP story: > Dustin was like, 'Hey, I want to help out" > Zuckerberg told Moskovitz, "That's pretty cool. But you don't know any PHP." > "That weekend he went home, bought the book 'PERL for Dummies,' came back, and was like, 'OK, I'm ready to go,'" Zuck said, and told him, "The site's written in PHP, not PERL, dude." - [VIDEO]

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