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Hi Theresa!

It's definitely true that we're doing more JS development, but we've by no means stopped doing PHP. We have our own version of PHP called Hack to add static typing (similar to Flow) and have custom-built HHVM, one of the fastest ways to run PHP. Some of our UIs are still rendered on the server, and even client-rendered features talk to our PHP server which handles most of the business logic and talks to our databases.

We're not using Node.js much. Our PHP stack is used for almost all of our web stuff, and it's pretty mature with a lot of libraries that help with building features – for example, we have a privacy-aware model layer which prevents you from even loading an object if the current user isn't allowed to see it. For this reason, it doesn't make much sense for us to spin up microservices written in other languages.

We do use Node in our JS build process and transform our code using Babel before our static resources get shipped to the CDNs.