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The base of this single-digit Nixie clock was made via CNC, with engraving done by a very small engraving bit, and the cavities for the buttons - that had to be of a precise depth into this 3/4” thick walnut - made with a larger cutting tool.

Though laser engraving might also have been an option to engrave the messages on these coasters, I liked the more natural appearance and depth provided by CNC engraving. The cutting tool was basically shaped like a cone; the deeper that bit goes into the wood, the wider the line. You can read up more here on some of the planning involved in CNC engraving.

An internal tool is a tool developed by engineers from within a company, aiming to increase the productivity of its engineers, increase the security of its system, and keep up the quality of its product among many others.

InternalToolcatalog

Some of the other tools lesser known outside of the company include Mercury (for version control), Hack (a static version of PHP that runs Facebook), HipHopDebugger aka hphpd (a terminal debugger on steroids), differential (for code review), and the list goes on. Meta’s internal tools are so vast that there are even some easter eggs, such as catching a Pokemon every time you push a code to production.

Lasers always leaves telltale signs in wood: since a laser does its work with heat, there will be burn marks along the edges of whatever was cut. And similarly, a laser does its engraving into wood items via burning, so that engraving is always burned. This isn’t the burning you see of a log in the fireplace, but rather, because of the very controlled power and positioning of a laser, just a potentially modest darkening of the material around the edges. That is, the engraving done by a laser will never be the same color as the natural wood.

Internaltoolbuilder

These bunny “canvases” - which have not yet been painted by artist Jun Yang - are of 1/2” thick baltic birch plywood, far too thick to cut by laser.

Do you have some cool laser- or CNC-made products to share? Or does this trigger other questions in how to tell the difference, or when to use one approach vs. the other? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic.

Big tech companies are well known for having internal tools, and Meta is no different. Almost every tool used by Meta engineers is an internal tool. Meta is also known for open-sourcing some of its tools; React JS, GraphQL, and Realy are some of Meta’s open-source tools, and React JS is currently one of the most popular web frameworks out there.

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Meta’s internal tools have made my life so much easier than I thought. They clearly developed the tools to help make the engineers’ lives easier. During my time there, I never felt the need to use Google or ChatGPT for anything, because I could always rely on Workplace (an equivalent to StackOverflow) to find questions similar to mine or ask new ones, and use Metamate (a chatbot powered by Llama, Meta’s LLM) whenever I need help with Hack syntaxes.

However, because the material is removed by a spinning cutter head rather than burning away by the width of the laser beam, a laser generally allows you to get more detail and sharper edges. That is because the cutting or engraving is just the width of the laser beam, and because a spinning bit can sometimes “tear out” wood fibers around where it is cutting. Also, for interlocking pieces - such as in a puzzle or the pair of coasters above - laser cut pieces would generally fit together more snugly and can be cut via just “drawing the lines”; trying to do that with a CNC would either leave a much larger border between the pieces, or require cutting individual pieces from much larger stock if a snug fit is desired.

HarveyTool

Prior to joining Meta as a Software Engineer Intern, my biggest worry was that almost none of the things I know will be relevant. I knew that most, if not all of the tools I would be using at work would be new to me. At the same time, my lack of self-confidence made me worry that I would not be able to adapt to the new tools quickly enough. I could not be further from the truth; on my second day, when I was pushing my first line of code to production, I realized why they decided to use Mercury instead of GitHub. Mercury is perfectly integrated into Meta’s server, and Meta’s own modified (and supercharged) VSCode.

Internal tools examples

A laser can provide incredible detail and precision, and also ensure a minimum of wasted material. But because it cuts by heat (i.e.: burning), only relatively thin layers of wood can be laser cut.

Cutting or CNCing the wood uses a rotating cutter head to remove material from a solid piece of wood. The three main advantages of this as compared to a laser are:

I may need to explain what I meant above by “server”: Meta’s engineers do not work on their local machine; instead, they spawn an on-demand server (think of it as a virtual machine) that is a local copy of the codebase they are working with. Within this server, one can work exactly like on localhost. The coolest part is that this on-demand server can save multiple versions of the same code. So I can commit multiple versions “locally” using Mercury, jump from one version to another in one click, and make a change to an older version which will update all newer versions (unless there is a conflict). So, I can complete an entire large chunk of work on the on-demand server and then push everything to production all at once. I can keep the same on-demand server for as long as I need it, or I can get a new one each time, and all my work will be smoothly moved from one server to another.

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Incredible detail in thin wood, but note the discoloration around the edges, especially at the corners where the laser lingered slightly longer.

And just like the multi-layer laser-cut map above, we can construct multi-layer CNC pieces when the wood is much thicker, such as this lion, one of the more intricate and involved art pieces I’ve done so far:

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To sum up the properties of the results: laser engraving gives you incredible detail albeit with some discoloration, while CNC engraving gives you depth. And laser cutting gives you very clean vertical lines but also with discoloration, and limited to thin materials, while CNC cutting allows you to work through thick materials and to cut to very specific depths to form truly three dimensional objects.

Internaltoolsoftware

The tray part of this 2.5” deep key tray was cut out via a CNC; a laser could not remove the interior material to a precise depth, nor cleanly shape the vertical interior or exterior sides.

I’ve often been asked if the engraved coasters I make are “laser cut” - they are not - which brings me to today’s topic: how to tell if something is cut or engraved with a laser (vs. cut or engraved with a CNC).

When using a laser with wood, there are really just two “depths” you can set the laser to: engrave, or cut all the way through. You cannot use a laser to create detailed multi-depth cuts, except via stacking those layers on top of each other after the laser has cut them.