Palo Alto: Curiously Recurring Bug Patterns at Facebook

I've spent the last few years watching Facebook's C++ codebase grow by several orders of magnitude. Despite constantly improving abstractions, constantly improving tooling, frequent internal courses, and ongoing internal discussion, there are bug patterns we simply cannot stop from being reintroduced into our code. My hope is to show some of the most common (and infamous) bugs in our history, and the surprising complexity that arises in some apparently simple situations.

This talk serves the dual purpose of educating the intermediate (and perhaps the occasional advanced) C++ programmer about some really nasty common pitfalls, as well as being a plea to experts to help further improve the language, libraries, and best practices to help educate and eradicate some of these problematic patterns.

Louis Brandy is a Director of Engineering on Facebook's core C++ library and tooling team. He is primarily focused on the health of the large C++ codebase and all of the tools that help make it healthier. He often works on the core C++ libraries but occasionally wanders into compilers and static and dynamic analysis tools. He also does the weekly C++ onboarding class for all new engineers at Facebook.