Early life and Education
Mark Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York and grew up in the nearby town of Dobbs Ferry. From an early age, Mark showed an aptitude for computer programming. His father, a dentist, taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and his father hired software developers to create a messaging program for Mark and his three sisters. Throughout high school, Mark kept coding and built many small programs for fun. His most notable accomplishment during this period was a program that he called “ZuckNet”, an instant messaging system used between him, his father, and the hospital he worked in. After graduating from high school in 2002, he attended Harvard University.
Harvard Days
At Harvard, Mark enrolled in computer science classes, as well as courses in psychology and neuroscience. He then joined a competitive programming team called the Phoenix S-K, to sharpen his coding skills. Other members of this team included student entrepreneurs such as Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes, who later became part of the founding team of Facebook. According to records, Mark spent a great deal of time polishing his coding abilities and working on his few projects.
Launch of Facebook
In 2004, Mark launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, initially focusing on connecting students of the same school. He used a combination of HTML and CSS, two of the three core technologies of the World Wide Web, to animate and add an interactive component to his website. By using HTML and CSS, Mark was able to create pages which users could interact with and make dynamic changes to the content.
Continued Learning
Mark took his efforts to learn coding further and began visiting companies like Microsoft and Google. He took time to understand the philosophies of both companies and further refine his coding style. It is said that Mark picked up several tips from his visits, regarding how to apply the latest cutting-edge technology to web development. After a few years, Mark became a well-known figure in Silicon Valley and was seen as a gifted programmer with an uncanny intuitive sense for the Internet.
The Facebook Code Base
As Facebook gained traction, Mark continued to expand his coding ability. He needed a powerful backend infrastructure for his growing website and invested in building out a robust code base. Initially he employed the same combination of HTML and CSS that he used to initially create Facebook. Later he developed a new web programming language that he called “XHP”. XHP allowed developers to more quickly construct complex websites and applications by connecting HTML markup tags to their corresponding server side code.
Also important: Architecture and Frameworks
Mark didn’t rely on HTML, XHP, and CSS alone. He also invested heavily into hardware architecture, open source application frameworks, and exploring various alternatives to OpenSSL and Apache. These investments allowed Facebook to become the world’s most popular social media platform, serving more than 2.5 billion users each month.
The Take Away
Mark Zuckerberg’s success as a programmer is primarily due to his early programming training and his continued efforts to stay current on the latest web technologies. He was able to combine his technical aptitude with a natural intuition for leveraging the potential of the Internet and modern web development tools. While it appears he may have had a leg up due to his early experiences, it is clear that Mark’s continued dedication to understand and apply the latest developments in web engineering, has had a major impact on the success of Facebook.
Php and JavaScript
Mark Zuckerberg also began to use PHP, a widely used server-side scripting language, to augment his code base and make the necessary changes required to manage the massive growth of Facebook. PHP allowed him to more easily construct complex, dynamic webpages and services. There has also been some evidence that suggests he invested in the use of JavaScript, a powerful scripting language used in web browsers, to animate and create complex client-side interfaces.
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Mark is also known to have invested heavily in the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to target ads, recommend content and recognize faces. He introduced a new AI platform, dubbed “FBLearner”, which uses a software stack built on Java and the Hadoop distributed computing framework. This technology is used to analyze user data and make decisions about how best to engage users.
Data Science & Analytics
Finally, Mark invested heavily in the use of data science and analytics. His efforts enabled Facebook to better understand user behavior, by analyzing all the data collected from their interactions with the platform. Mark also developed a custom software platform, called “GraphLab”, which he used to develop a wide variety of predictive analytics applications. GraphLab was particularly useful in providing Facebook with insights into user activity and engagement, allowing them to make better decisions about how to each interact with users.
