“Move fast and break things” is at the heart of Facebook’s Hacker Way ethos. This reckless-seeming phrase has become a rallying cry for a new generation of Web and mobile developers. Yet like the millennial generation itself, it’s often misunderstood.
The expression does not advocate for building brittle systems merely to solve pressing problems quickly. Instead, it’s about understanding that modern systems can be fragile — and architectures must be constructed with that innate fragility in mind. This might mean a containerized infrastructure that can be quickly rolled back to a known good state, or it might mean using message queues and actors to quickly fire up new processes and services when one fails, retrying again and again until a message gets processed.
