Lecture by Mark Zuckerberg on Computer Science in the Real World

Introduction by Michael D. Smith

• Guest speaker: Mark Zuckerberg
• Founder of Facebook.com
• Used at over 2000 schools across the nation

Mark Zuckerberg's Talk

• First time at a lecture at Harvard
• Plan: Discuss courses at Harvard that influenced Facebook's decisions
• Will speak for ~20 minutes, followed by Q&A

Initial Development of Facebook

• Started with CS121, not CS50
• Created Facebook in PHP in February 2004
• First launched at Harvard; within weeks, few thousand users
• Decision to expand to other colleges

Expansion Challenges

• Distributed databases for different schools to manage load
• Most activity is school-centric
• Kept computations manageable by distributing school databases
• Example: Big O notation's impact on scaling computations for social connections

Technical Architecture

• Initial setup on one rented server
• Used MySQL and Apache
• Shifted to more web servers for load balancing

Performance Optimizations

• Memcache and in-house solutions for caching
• Issues with distributed hash tables
• Implemented redundancy and better distribution

Questions from the Audience

Competition & Business Environment

• Avoid focusing on competition (e.g., Google)
• Current advancement allows small operations to leverage technology for significant impact

Growth and Hiring

• Focus on hiring smart people
• Leveraging new technology enables fewer people to accomplish more
• Originally avoided extensive legal advice, faced issues later

Future of Facebook

• Constantly exploring new features
• The initial idea was a simple directory; expansions include Photos, Events, etc.

Privacy and Security

• Focus on user-controlled privacy settings
• Limited to school networks to keep information relevant and secure

Use Cases and Future Developments

• User tagging in photos
• Aggregating and showing how relationships evolve

Development and Organizational Culture

• Meritocracy for projects and ideas
• Continuous iteration and improvement

Engineering & Problem Solving

• Emphasis on tackling significant technical challenges
• Trusting smart engineers and their judgment
• Learning through practical experience and the internet

High School Network Expansion

• Differences in handling high school and college networks
• Emphasis on user experience and social context for feature usage

Final Thoughts

• Value of studying CS and engineering at Harvard to leverage technology effectively
• Importance of hard courses and continuous learning

End of the Lecture