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What is Wez Furlong?
Wez Furlong is an experienced software engineer and entrepreneur whose personal site at wezfurlong.org serves as his blog, project archive and professional introduction. Much of his work has been released as open source, and his own summary notes that if you have browsed the web or received email, there is a strong chance his software was involved. The site also lists mentoring as a service he offers.
What you will find on the site
- Blog posts and archive: Entries span many years, with categories covering programming, APIs, databases, Windows, macOS-related work and conference talks. Posts are often brief technical notes or personal updates rather than long tutorials.
- Project writing: For example, a 2013 post introduces Facebook's Watchman, a tool that watches files and keeps an indexed view of the filesystem so build or test steps can be triggered when matching files change. That post is useful for understanding the motivation behind the tool, not as current documentation.
- Background and contact: A short about section, links to publications and projects, and a Mastodon handle for reaching him.
Who it suits
Developers curious about the history of tools like Watchman, readers looking for an experienced engineer's perspective on open-source work, and people considering mentoring. It is a personal site, so expect opinion and scattered notes rather than a maintained reference.
A practical next step: if you are researching Watchman specifically, read the 2013 post for context and then consult the project's current official documentation for installation and configuration.
What is Watchman used for?
Watchman is a file-watching tool that keeps a live, indexed view of a filesystem and lets you query file status almost instantly. Wez Furlong describes it on Wez Furlong as something built to watch files, record information about them as they change, and answer questions about their status far faster than scanning the filesystem yourself. It stays in sync using kernel filesystem notifications.
Practical uses fall into two groups:
- Triggering work on change: run builds, tests, or scripts when files matching a pattern change. A front-end developer editing components could have a rebuild start on save without polling the whole tree.
- Fast status queries: ask which files changed, which are new, or what state a set of files is in. Build tools, test runners, and editors use this to avoid rescanning large repositories.
The trade-off is that Watchman is infrastructure, not a standalone app. It pays off when you have large trees, frequent edits, or tools that would otherwise poll the disk; for a small project with occasional edits, an ordinary watcher or a simple rebuild script is usually enough. If you're evaluating it, check whether your build or test tooling already integrates with it—that integration, rather than the daemon itself, is where the speedup shows up.
Should I use Watchman to trigger builds when my source files change?
Watchman can work as a build trigger, but that isn't its main strength. Wez Furlong built it at Facebook so tools could instantly query the status of a set of files, and it keeps that view in sync using kernel filesystem notifications. Triggering build or test steps on matching file changes is a supported use, but the queryable file-state view is the durable reason to adopt it.
Where a trigger-only tool fits better
If all you need is "run this command when these files change," a small watcher such as watchexec, entr, or your build tool's built-in watch mode is usually simpler. It has fewer moving parts and nothing to keep running as a background service. Choose Watchman when you also need fast, repeated queries about what changed, or when you're already in an ecosystem that expects it—for example, JavaScript tooling that uses it to speed up file discovery.
What to weigh
- Scale and precision: Watchman's indexed view pays off on large trees where naive polling is slow or misses changes. For a handful of files in a small project, that advantage mostly disappears.
- Operational cost: It's a background service you install, start, and keep healthy. On a single developer laptop that's minor; across CI runners or many machines it becomes something to manage.
- Matching rules: Triggers fire on patterns you define, so you need to decide which changes should start a build and which should be ignored. Get this wrong and you'll see redundant or missed runs.
A concrete test
Take one project and add a trigger that runs your build when source files change, while ignoring generated output and dependency directories. If the trigger fires reliably and the build stays fast, keep it. If you find yourself fighting the service or the pattern rules, drop back to a simpler watcher and revisit only when file-query speed becomes a real bottleneck.
For background on the design, Furlong's post announcing Watchman on the Facebook Engineering blog explains the filesystem-view approach; his own site at Wez Furlong also collects his writing on projects like this.
How does Wez Furlong's mentoring service work?
The site does not describe how the mentoring service works. The homepage states that Wez Furlong is an experienced software engineer and entrepreneur who offers mentoring, but it gives no details on format, scheduling, pricing, eligibility or how to apply. The only concrete route it offers is contacting him on Mastodon at @[email protected], and there is a "Mentoring" link in the site navigation that is the natural place to look for terms.
What the site does establish
- He presents himself as an engineer and entrepreneur with a long record of open-source work, including projects referenced across the site's categories and archive.
- The blog shows the kind of work he writes about: developer tooling and infrastructure. The Watchman post describes a file-watching service built to keep a synced view of the filesystem and answer file-status queries quickly, with build or test steps triggered by matching changes. A mentee interested in tooling, systems or open-source maintenance would be drawing on directly relevant experience.
- Posts span many years with long gaps, so the blog is not a reliable indicator of current availability or response times.
Practical next step
Treat the Mastodon contact as the starting point and make the first message do the work. A short note covering what you are building, the specific decision you are stuck on, your timezone and the cadence you want (a one-off review versus an ongoing arrangement) lets him judge fit quickly. Ask directly about format, cost and capacity, since the site does not answer those.
How to judge fit
Mentoring pays off most when you have a concrete problem and want an experienced second opinion, such as reviewing an architecture choice, preparing an open-source project for contributors, or pressure-testing a technical plan before committing. It suits less well if you want structured coursework or a fixed curriculum, because nothing on the site suggests that kind of programme.
For background on his work before reaching out, the blog archive is the main source: Wez Furlong.
Which open source projects has Wez Furlong built that I might already be using?
Wez Furlong's own site points most directly to Watchman, the file-watching tool he announced on the Facebook Engineering blog in 2013. According to his description, it watches files, records how they change, and keeps an indexed view of the filesystem so tools can query file status instantly and trigger builds or tests when matching files change. If you work in a large codebase with automated builds, test runners or editor tooling that reacts to file changes, there's a reasonable chance Watchman is already running somewhere in your stack.
His site also says much of what he has built over the years is open source and that "if you've ever browsed the web or received an email there's a strong chance that my software was involved." That's his claim, not a specific list, so treat it as a pointer rather than proof of any particular project. The page's category list hints at the areas he has written about—PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, Node.js, Windows, Solaris and messaging—which suggests his open-source work spans web and email infrastructure as well as developer tooling.
A practical next step: check whether Watchman is installed on your machine (watchman --version) or listed as a dependency in a project you maintain. If it is, you're already using one of his projects. For the rest, browse his projects and publications pages on Wez Furlong rather than relying on memory, since the site itself notes that some older project hosting has disappeared over time.
How can I contact Wez Furlong or follow his updates?
The site points to two practical channels: he says "Find me on @[email protected]," so a follow on Fosstodon is the clearest way to catch new posts and replies, and he also invites topic requests by @-mentioning him there. For professional enquiries, the site notes that he offers mentoring services and links "learn more about me over here," so the About page is the place to check before proposing a mentoring arrangement.
A sensible next step: follow him on Fosstodon if you want occasional updates, and read the About page first if your goal is mentoring, so your first message can state what you're working on and what kind of help you need. Expect infrequent blogging rather than a steady feed—he has openly questioned whether he'll post more often than "once a decade," so social replies are likely to be more current than the archive.
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