Meta Tech Podcast (Meta)

New year, new us! Inside Facebook Mobile is now the Meta Tech Podcast but Pascal will continue to bring you stories about mobile development and many other topics.  For this episode's interview, we're tackling one of the few remaining big apps we never had a guest from: Messenger. Amy worked on Messenger for 3 years before recently moving on to Reality Apps to work on AR.  

Amy discusses with Pascal how Messenger for iOS was rewritten as part of Project Lightspeed to make it smaller and faster. They used a range of low-level hacks while providing high-level abstractions that product teams could safely and productively build on top of. Amy was also the first one to prototype with Catalyst and Meta and has some important tips for you on how not to accidentally wipe your Mac while doing so. 

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://facebookcareers.com.

Links:

• Project LightSpeed: https://engineering.fb.com/2020/03/02/data-infrastructure/messenger/
• Mac Catalyst: https://developer.apple.com/mac-catalyst/
• Buck: https://buck.build/
• Remodel: https://github.com/facebook/remodel - Remodel is a tool that helps iOS and OS X developers avoid repetitive code by generating Objective-C models that support coding, value comparison, and immutability.

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Introduction Amy 2:25
• Messenger Culture 3:37
• Building with Buck 5:38
• Catalyst 6:27
• Project Lightspeed 17:13
• Remodel 23:55
• Image Asset Optimisations 28:50
• Theming 36:44
• What's Next for Amy? 38:21
• Outro 39:21
• Bloopers 39:54

Pascal is joined by Rachel in the co-host chair for this first episode of the new decade. The two interview Sergey from the Android UI Frameworks team to discuss the long-awaited rollout of Kotlin within Facebook. Sergey himself is currently working on a new set of APIs for building UI components in Kotlin.

With Rachel’s background in React and React Native, they explore some of the inspirations and differences between React, React Native and Litho before talking about the design of new Kotlin APIs for Litho. The last part of the conversation focuses on the gradual adoption of Kotlin at Facebook and why this is a big undertaking at a company operating at this scale.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Links

• Litho: https://fblitho.com/
• React Native Docs: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started
• Flipper: https://fbflipper.com/
• ktfmt: https://github.com/facebookincubator/ktfmt
• Redex: https://github.com/facebook/redex
• Redex IFBM Episode: https://pca.st/J3cn

Timestamps

• Intro 0:00
• React Native Docs Update 0:58
• Flipper Sidebar Reorganisation 4:42
• Interview with Sergey 8:01
• Litho and React-style UI frameworks 14:47
• Kotlin API Design 27:53
• Kotlin at Facebook 36:30
• Redex Code Optimisation 39:25
• Introducing New Languages at Facebook 40:32
• Facebook Mobile Build Infrastructure 41:19
• Litho's Target Audience 43:07
• Educating About New Languages 46:29
• Code Formatting (ktfmt) 48:45
• Current Kotlin Use at Facebook 50:21
• Outro 51:41
• Bloopers 55:40

Python at Meta is huge. Not only does it famously power Instagram's backend, but it underpins our configuration systems, much of our AI work and many services. Amethyst joins Pascal for this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast to talk about how the Python Foundation Team works to improve the developer experience of everyone working with Python at Meta and Fixit 2, the freshly open-sourced linter framework built on top of libcst.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Fixit 2 announcement post: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/08/07/developer-tools/fixit-2-linter-meta/

• Fixit: https://fixit.readthedocs.io

• µfmt: https://ufmt.omnilib.dev

• µsort: https://usort.readthedocs.io

• LibCST: https://libcst.readthedocs.io

• 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Buck2: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/10/23/developer-tools/5-things-you-didnt-know-about-buck2/

• Scheduling Jupyter Notebooks at Meta: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/08/29/security/scheduling-jupyter-notebooks-meta/

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Intro Amethyst 1:57

• Production vs Software Engineering 3:41

• PE for language teams 5:40

• Python at Meta 6:58

• Python3 migration 10:15

• Projects on the Python Foundation Team 16:30

• libcst and codemods 21:55

• What Python looks like at Meta 25:53

• Meta's involvement in the Python community 30:30

• The importance of lints at Meta 35:13

• Why another linter? 39:11

• Favourite lint 46:26

• Outro 48:17

• Bloopers 48:54

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: The time to talk about calling libraries that power most of our audio and video calls across Meta’s app. Alice, Ishan and Hani join Pascal to talk about how they replaced the different calling solutions with a library that’s extensible by the teams that choose to adopt it. But with great power comes great responsibility, so how does their team balance the desire for new features with the mandate to stay small, fast and reliable? Tune in for episode 46 to learn this and more!

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy and https://mastodon.social/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• Rsys: A smaller, faster video calling library for our apps: https://engineering.fb.com/2020/12/21/video-engineering/rsys/
• Flipper: https://fbflipper.com/
• Horizon Workrooms: https://www.meta.com/de/en/work/workrooms/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Team Overview 1:34
• RSYS History 4:42
• Design Tradeoffs 6:10
• Testing Infrastructure 8:09
• Usage and Support Model 11:04
• Core Architectural Components 12:58
• Changing Engines Mid-Air 16:48
• Measuring Quality 19:30
• Building on top of RSYS 21:34
• Collaboration Model 24:22
• Feature Development 26:41
• Experimentation 28:43
• Metaverse Strategy 29:51
• What's Next for RSYS 33:26
• Outro 34:36
• Bloopers 35:24

Pascal went mobile again and brought the mics to this year’s droidcon Android conference in London. He interviewed the record-breaking six speakers Facebook had this year and discussed some topics with them. This episode kicks off with Sergey, who presented a deep-dive into the current state of cross-platform coroutine libraries for Kotlin, comparing Reaktive and kotlinx.coroutines Flow in their usability, performance and memory appetite. The second interview is with Alexander from the Fresco team who talks about the evolution of the open source image loading and memory management library and teases at what’s up next for the widely used project. In the last interview we hear from Lisa (https://twitter.com/lisawrayz), a software engineer on the Messenger Lite team. She joins Pascal to chat about the design principles that went into designing a messenger application for emerging markets.

Sadly, the video recordings of the talks are currently unavailable, but we will update you here and on the podcast as soon as that changes.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

News and Topics

• fbjni soft launch: https://github.com/facebookincubator/fbjni
• PyTorch for Android: https://pytorch.org/mobile/android/
• Fresco: https://frescolib.org/
• Reaktive: https://github.com/badoo/Reaktive
• Kotlinx.coroutines: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.coroutines
• Messenger Lite: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.mlite

Timestamps

• Intro    0:05
• News: fbjni    1:43
• News: PyTorch for Android    2:34
• Interviews    3:05
• Correction    3:43
• Sergey on Kotlin Coroutines    4:26
• Alexander on Fresco    11:42
• Lisa on Messenger Lite    26:58
• Outro    35:50
• Nope, no bloopers    36:33

Did you watch F8 this year? You've probably seen the new Facebook blue and your app got a sleeker, more modern icon. Hilal is part of the team that made that happen and he joins Mihaela and Pascal on episode 13 to talk about how to scale packaging and distributing UI resources to devices. Hilal also helps fight UI regressions and inconsistencies with the screenshot tests infrastructure he contributes to.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Topics

• F8 Talks: https://developers.facebook.com/videos/
• mvfst: https://github.com/facebookincubator/mvfst
• The Diff: https://thediffpodcast.com/
• idb: https://github.com/facebook/idb
• Urban Computing Foundation: https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/07/uber-google-ibm-and-others-join-the-urban-computing-foundation-to-create-tools-for-cities-of-tomorrow/
• Chris Banes - Becoming a master window fitter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mGDMVRO3iE

Timestamps

To improve consistency across our family of apps, engineers have built a large number of reusable components. But how do designers communicate to engineers which component to use? How do you keep the look consistent across our various frameworks? How do you make sure that documentation stays up-to-date? The way we always do: by building tools. Sriram from the Design Systems Engineering team talks about how their org solves the design-engineering handoff problems and improves the overall UI quality of Facebook apps. They work on a suite of tools that spans from providing access to our components directly in design tools like Figma to metrics that tell developers about potential quality issues in their surfaces. Tune in to learn directly from Sriram how we attempt to solve design at scale.

Links:

• F8 Refresh: https://www.f8.com/
• Flipper: https://fbflipper.com/
• Facebook Open Source on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FacebookOpenSource
• Storybook: https://storybook.js.org/
• InVision Design System Manager: https://www.invisionapp.com/design-system-manager
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Interview 2:39
• Outro 30:17

If you hear privacy and your first thought is laborious processes and access management, this interview may be just as mind-expanding for you as it was for our host Pascal. He is joined by Alex and Haozhi who talk about the Anonymous Credential Service (ACS), a highly available multitenant service that allows clients to authenticate in a de-identified manner. They discuss the cryptographic primitives powering the service and the various challenges they encountered scaling it to support Meta's products.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy and https://mastodon.social/@passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• How Meta enables de-identified authentication at scale - https://engineering.fb.com/2022/03/30/security/de-identified-authentication-at-scale/

• Open-sourcing Anonymous Credential Service - https://engineering.fb.com/2022/12/12/security/anonymous-credential-service-acs-open-source/

• ACS on GitHub - https://github.com/facebookresearch/acs

• ReactJS - The Documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pDqJVdNa44

Timestamps

• Intro 0:12

• Alex and Haozhi Intro 1:22

• Cryptography and Privacy 2:47

• Team Mission 3:35

• Data Minimisation 4:28

• PETs 5:13

• Why authenticate? 8:39

• ACS under the hood 10:06

• ACS Architecture 16:02

• Challenges 21:03

• ACS in Open Source 26:36

• Key-Derivation Functions 29:22

• How to get started 32:10

• Outro 33:47

• Bloopers 34:29

Fabio joins Pascal to go deep into a listener question: How does Facebook modularise iOS applications? After discussing the state of the iOS build systems and package managers out in the wild, they turn to Buck, Facebook’s monorepo build system, and how it helps developers to define clear module boundaries. One of the problems when a new module is only one new folder away are dependency graphs which look like a big ball of spaghetti. Thankfully, Buck offers some ways of taming sprawling graphs before they get out of control.

Topics:

• Litho: https://fblitho.com/
• Litho RenderCore: https://github.com/facebook/litho/tree/master/litho-rendercore
• Flipper: https://fbflipper.com/
• ComponentKit: https://componentkit.org/
• Pragma​ Conference 2016 - Fabio Milano - 'I have a framework idea' - Repeat less, share more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml6NSv5wDRU
• Buck: https://buck.build/
• Spiritfarer: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12924108/
• Ori and the Will of the Wisps: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8329350/

This episode features Balazs, a manager on the Image Infra team, who joins Mihaela and Pascal to shed some light on what it's like to be an engineering manager at Facebook. Balazs talks about some of the projects he's worked on as an Android engineer after he joined Facebook and shares how and why he transitioned to management, starting this new role in the Fresco team. Balazs is now managing a team that is focused on performance and he shares some insights on the unique challenges his team is solving and how he fits in that as an engineering manager. As usual, the episode starts off with a quick discussion on the latest Facebook Open-Source news and upcoming Android talks.

For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com.

Projects discussed:

- Fizz: https://code.fb.com/networking-traffic/deploying-tls-1-3-at-scale-with-fizz-a-performant-open-source-tls-library/
- XAR: https://code.fb.com/data-infrastructure/xars-a-more-efficient-open-source-system-for-self-contained-executables/
- Fresco: http://frescolib.org/
- Profilio: https://code.fb.com/android/profilo-understanding-app-performance-in-the-wild/
- Redex: https://github.com/facebook/redex

Talks:
- Droidcon: http://uk.droidcon.com/
- Londroid: https://www.meetup.com/android/

Julia works as a technical program manager in release engineering. This means that she makes sure that all of Facebook's Android apps are released on time, which means once a week for most of them, while making sure that every version improves over the previous one in stability and features. Tune in to learn how this works when dealing with billions of users on thousands of different devices.

For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com.

For another socially distant interview, Pascal and Rachel are joined by Martin and Kevin who work on Instagram Reels, which had its global launch just a few weeks ago. They lift the veil on country tests, what makes stitching videos seamlessly together so hard on Android and iOS and share their thoughts on the short-form video space in general. You will also learn why doing the simple thing first really pays off when working on complex projects.

Before the interview, Pascal walks you through the recent events in the Facebook Open Source space.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Topics

• Hermes: https://hermesengine.dev/
• Facebook Open Source on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCQY962PmHabTjaHv2wJzfQ
• Docusaurus v2: https://v2.docusaurus.io/

Timestamps

• Intro 0:05
• News 1:16
• Interview 3:32
• Outro 43:02

Bloopers 43:45

Confused by the syntax of git’s rebase command? Overwhelmed with branch management? Check out Meta’s new git-compatible source control management system Sapling. Durham and Michael, two of the architects behind the recent open-source release, join Pascal on the podcast to discuss their plans for the project, how it was possible to extract one small part of Meta’s large SCM codebase and what the differences between Sapling, git and Mercurial are.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy and https://mastodon.social/@passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• Sapling: https://sapling-scm.com/
• Review Stack: https://reviewstack.dev/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Durham and Michael Intro 1:18
• What is Sapling? 2:56
• git Compatibility 3:48
• What's Available Today? 5:28
• Sapling vs git 7:28
• Branching Models 10:20
• Stacks 13:09
• Stacks and GitHub 17:28
• Scaling Sapling 22:25
• Extracting Sapling for Open Source 29:32
• What's Next for Sapling 34:22
• Outro 39:07
• Bloopers 40:00

For episode 55, Pascal speaks with Katherine and returning guest Dustin, two software engineers at Meta about how to ship code at Meta. Why do we have a monorepo? Why and how do we do pre-commit code review? What does our CI infrastructure look like? Get the answers to these questions and many more in this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• The evolution of Facebook’s iOS app architecture - Engineering At Meta: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/02/06/ios/facebook-ios-app-architecture/ 

• Episode 47: Source control at Meta - https://pca.st/episode/429e9f38-6537-43e3-b929-fbeeda326ed5

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Intro Katherine 1:55

• Dustin's Origin Story 4:38

• Topic Intro 6:28

• Why Monorepo(s) 7:18

• What Makes Monorepos Hard? 12:15

• Why do we Have so Many Files? 17:31

• Who Owns Stuff? 25:29

• Life of a Diff 28:58

• Writing Bots Writing Code Writing Bots 34:16

• Finding Reviewers 38:46

• Why Are Things Not Constantly on Fire? 41:43

• Outro 47:47

• Outtakes 48:46

Inside Facebook Mobile is back for a special interview with the team behind the Facebook COVID-19 Info Centre. Chang, Jarman and Zaven share their experiences of building and shipping a global product like this over the course of just a few weeks. We discuss how the early architectural decisions enabled the seamless collaboration with tens of teams that were all working remotely.

Before we get to the interview, Mihaela joins Pascal for a quick check-in on Litho, the native UI framework for Android, and Flipper, an extensible dev-tools platform for mobile.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Topics

• COVID-19 Hub: https://www.facebook.com/covid-19
• Litho: https://fblitho.com/
• Flipper: https://fbflipper.com/

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06
• News: Litho 1:09
• News: Flipper 4:31
• Interview 7:27
• Post-Interview 35:36
• Outro 37:50
• Bloopers 38:14

For the last episode of the decade, Pascal is joined by Inside Facebook Mobile royalty Emil, who shares what he has been up to since his last appearance on the podcast and how Facebook Open Source is still part of his day-to-day work.

Then we head over to Droidcon UK 2019 again, where Pascal interviews Aziz from the Android Native UI Frameworks team about benchmarking UI components, followed by a chat with Aziz’s teammates Andy and Pasquale about effective multi-threading on Android.

Unfortunately, the video recordings of the talks are still unavailable, but we will update you if that changes.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

News and Topics

• fbjni: https://github.com/facebookincubator/fbjni
• Jest: https://jestjs.io/
• Litho: https://fblitho.com/
• Flipper: http://fbflipper.com/
• Visly: http://visly.app/
• Facebook and Microsoft Partnering on Remote Development: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2019/11/19/facebook-microsoft-partnering-remote-development/
• The Diff - Talking Libra with Eric Nakagawa: https://thediffpodcast.com/docs/episode-8

Timestamps

• Intro
• fbjni 3:43
• News: FB and MS work on VS Code 8:47
• Skip Language (http://skiplang
• Interviews 11:55
• Interview: Aziz on UI Benchmarking 12:20
• Interview: Pasquale and Andy on Threading 21:00
• Post-Interview Chat with Emil 32:36
• Outro 41:03
• Bloopers 41:44

In this episode, Mihaela and Pascal chat with Mona from Instagram New York. We talk about Mona's journey from working on web in California to scroll performance at Instagram and how performance overall is approached from measuring, tackling regressions and establishing a company-wide performance culture.

In addition to this, we go through some of our listener questions about team structure, time and release management and pick this up later in our interview where we discuss differences in our overall approach to engineering and QA between Facebook and Instagram.

Topics discussed:

• deepfloat: https://code.fb.com/ai-research/floating-point-math/
• Litho: https://fblitho.com/
• Flipper Notifications: https://fbflipper.com/docs/writing-a-plugin.html#notifications
• Profilo: https://facebookincubator.github.io/profilo/

Time stamps:

|0:00 |Intro |
|0:31 |DeepFloat |
|1:15 |Flipper News |
|3:50 |Q: Team structures at FB |
|4:56 |Q: Time management in teams |
|7:06 |Q: FB Release Management |
|7:33 |Q: Our views on the structure |
|9:10 |Guest Intro: Mona |
|9:58 |Mona's Journey from Product to Infra |
|13:32 |Switching teams at FB |
|15:01 |Performance at IG |
|15:24 |Measuring performance |
|17:27 |Dealing with regressions |
|19:07 |Evolution of scroll perf tracking at IG |
|20:03 |Good/bad perf practises |
|21:36 |Frameworks helping with perf |
|22:48 |Engineering differences between FB and IG |
|24:01 |QA at IG |
|27:08 |App size growth |
|28:47 |Maintaining a high perf bar |
|33:51 |What would you do if it wasn't perf? |
|34:56 |Puppies and oat milk |
|36:59 |Outro |
|38:49 |Bloopers |

We are continuing our focus on UI Quality from last episode and are diving deep into design linters. Elle and her team work on Facebook-internal Figma plugins that provide guidance on aspects like colours and usability of user interfaces. In the interview, Elle and Pascal discuss how the plugin leverages Facebook's web architecture to roll out changes quickly and how a shared REST API allows for rules to be used in multiple contexts.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/insidefbmobile), Instagram (https://instagram.com/insidefbmobile) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out http://fb.com/careers.

Links

• Docusaurus 2.0 Beta - https://docusaurus.io/blog/2021/05/12/announcing-docusaurus-two-beta
• F8 - https://developers.facebook.com/f8/
• Rapid release at massive scale - https://engineering.fb.com/2017/08/31/web/rapid-release-at-massive-scale/
• Figma API - https://www.figma.com/developers/api
• GraphQL - https://graphql.org/
• Relay - https://relay.dev/

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06
• News: Docusaurus 2
• News: F8 1:59
• Elle introduction 2:13
• Shift Left Initiative 3:32
• UI Layout Linters 6:03
• Figma Plugins 14:20
• Outro 27:26
• Bloopers 28:23

Lisa works on the Dev Craft team at Instagram that embarked on a journey to bring Kotlin to the Instagram for Android code base a little over three years ago. Now, nearly half of the large codebase is migrated and over 80% of newly committed code is in Kotlin. Tune in to hear what the unique challenges of bringing a new language to an existing app are and what it means for build speed, IDE experiences and developer happiness.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy and https://mastodon.social/@passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Meta Engineering Blog: How Meta brought AV1 to Reels - https://engineering.fb.com/2023/02/21/video-engineering/av1-codec-facebook-instagram-reels/ 

• Source-only ABIs for Java - https://engineering.fb.com/2017/11/09/android/rethinking-android-app-compilation-with-buck/

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Intro Lisa 1:27

• Dev Craft at Instagram 3:03

• Building DevX Partnerships 3:56

• The History of Kotlin at Instagram 6:22

• Declarative UI 18:29

• Build Speed Challenges 20:25

• Source-Only ABIs 23:19

• IDE Performance 26:19

• Kotlin at IG in 2023 27:15

• Outro 32:02

• Bloopers 33:07

With large-scale public events seeming rather distant right now, the concept of virtual conferences is an exciting way to stay in touch with people and learn new things. Pascal is joined by the organising team of the Women of React conference, where women take the virtual stage, but everyone is welcome to attend and participate. Cassidy, Sara, Kevin, Jenn and our very own Rachel share how they came up with the idea and what you need to kick off your own online conference.

The conference will happen on Saturday, April 25, 2020 and you can register for free at https://womenofreact.com/.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Topics

• Women of React: https://womenofreact.com/
• event.Handler() pod: https://eventhandlerpod.com/
• Board Game Arena: https://boardgamearena.com/

Timestamps

• 0:00 - Intro
• 1:54 - Interview
• 27:28 - Outro

How do you build your own mixed reality headset from sketch to scale? That's exactly what Alfred Jones, VP of hardware engineering at Meta Reality Labs, discussed with host Pascal. From choosing the right display technology, battery, thermal budget and of course hitting the right price point. How he manages to not fall victim to choice paralysis and so much more in episode 68.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod) or Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host Pascal (https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Caddy: https://engineering.fb.com/2024/07/18/virtual-reality/caddy-cad-mixed-reality-mr-meta/

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Alfred Introduction 1:40

• Who do you work with? 3:23

• Decision making frameworks 5:20

• Is MR the final destination? 7:19

• What makes good passthrough such a challenge? 10:18

• How to build your own MR headset 13:51

• Hardware design constraints 19:00

• Prototype phases 22:34

• Durability testing 26:23

• Dogfooding at Meta 28:55

• Magic wand for technical limitations 31:56

• Outro 34:26

Back from a short hiatus, Pascal is joined by Jon to talk about the infrastructure that allows commit to sync between Meta's monorepo and GitHub. While ShipIt has been around for a while, allowing commits from the internal repository to sync out to GitHub, Diff Train is its younger brother to allow the inverse. This makes it possible for open-source-first projects like PyTorch to develop on GitHub and bring changes back into the monorepo without sacrificing security and reliability.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• https://github.com/facebook/pyre-check
• https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder
• https://github.com/facebook/hhvm
• https://github.com/facebook/fbshipit

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Intro Jon 1:49
• Open-sourcing an internal project 7:26
• Open Source Team @ Meta 10:22
• Third-party dependencies 12:07
• ShipIt 13:48
• Diff Train 29:01
• Most excited about 41:07
• The GIL 42:29
• Outro 44:22

Unfortunately due to the current global pandemic, we don't have an interview for you, but stay tuned and subscribe to the feed for some remote interviews in the near future.

Do follow @passy, @rachelnabors, and @insidefbmobile for updates.

Threads went from idea to 100M users in just about five months. This would not have been possible without building on top of Meta's existing systems and infrastructure. Join Pascal as he speaks with Joy, Cameron and Richard, three engineers from the Threads team who worked on backend, iOS and Android, respectively to learn about the challenges they faced along the way.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Threads: https://threads.net

• Threads: The inside story of Meta’s newest social app - https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside-story-metas-newest-social-app/

• Litho: https://fblitho.com/

Timestamps

• Intro 0:00

• Introductions 0:56

• Intro: Cameron 1:42

• Intro: Joy 2:06

• Intro: Richard 2:30

• Early Days at Threads 3:03

• Specialisations 6:52

• Why built on top of IG? 7:18

• iOS and Android approaches 10:17

• UI Frameworks 12:00

• Code sharing on server 15:36

• What broke? 20:04

• How has the team changed? 23:02

• Favourite moments 25:30

• Outro 29:45

• Outtakes 31:03

In April, WhatsApp announced the launch of a new cryptographic security feature to automatically verify a secured connection based on key transparency. Key transparency helps strengthen the guarantee that end-to-end encryption provides to private, personal messaging applications in a transparent manner available to all.

Rolling out a feature like this to WhatsApp's user base is not a small feat and requires some clever engineering to scale to the billions of users relying on WhatsApp to stay in touch with friends, family and business.

Pascal is joined by Sean and Kevin to discuss what Key Transparency means in practice and the various challenges they encountered as they scaled it up to billions of users.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Infer: https://fbinfer.com/

• Infer on GitHub: https://github.com/facebook/infer

• MTP Episode 18 about Infer: https://pca.st/5U9V

• Deploying key transparency at WhatsApp - Engineering at Meta: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/04/13/security/whatsapp-key-transparency/

• GitHub - facebook/akd: An implementation of an auditable key directory: https://github.com/facebook/akd/ 

• Parakeet: Practical Key Transparency for End-to-End Encrypted Messaging: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/parakeet-practical-key-transparency-for-end-to-end-encrypted-messaging/ 

• SEEMless: Secure End-to-End Encrypted Messaging with less trust: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/607

• Coniks: Bringing Key Transparency to End Users: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15/technical-sessions/presentation/melara 

• IETF Working Group on Key Transparency: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/keytrans/about

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• News Update: Infer turns 10 1:34

• Interview Intro 4:27

• Intro Kevin 4:45

• Intro Sean 6:07

• WhatsApp's mission 6:47

• PETs 7:58

• E2E basics 8:59

• Key transparency 10:32

• Crypto community response 18:20

• End-user changes 19:57

• Technical challenges and zero-knowledge proofs 23:18

• AKD 28:27

• Internal deployment 32:02

• Outro 42:16

• Bloopers 43:05

Emil and Pascal introduce themselves and tell you about what they've planned for their new podcast.

Please send feedback to mobilepodcasts@fb.com or reach out to Pascal and Emil directly.

Aida was part of one of the first Rust teams here at Meta. One of the biggest challenges was interacting with the large amount of existing C++. With the release of cxx, safe interop between C++ and even async Rust has become a lot easier.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Aida’s talk at Rust Nation: https://youtu.be/tsEuA9S5q9Q

• cxx: https://crates.io/crates/cxx

• Sapling: https://sapling-scm.com/

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Aida Intro 2:06

• Rust in Meta Source Control 2:50

• State of Rust at Meta 10:11

• bindgen 13:25

• cxx vs bindgen 17:49

• async Rust and C++ 19:04

• Dealing with Lifetimes 28:19

• Fixing Memory Leaks 31:25

• Thread safety with Send and Sync 33:48

• A Magic Wand for Async Rust 39:52

• Outro 43:04

• Outtakes 43:50

Red Team X is a security team at Meta that is responsible for finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in third-party products that could impact Meta's own security. The team acts as a hybrid between a traditional red team, which focuses on probing their own organisation's systems and products for vulnerabilities, and an elite bug-hunting group.

The team was founded by Vlad I. in 2020 when the pandemic and the sudden shift to Work From Home challenged various previously-held assumptions about security.

In his discussion with Pascal, Vlad explains the roles of different security teams within Meta, how they go about prioritising the highest-impact targets to exploit and how they work with vendors to ensure not just Meta but the entire world benefits from the fixes produced.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy and https://mastodon.social/@passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• The Diff episode about Velox: https://thediffpodcast.com/docs/episode-17

• Risky Business Podcast: https://risky.biz/

• RTX Blog: https://rtx.meta.security

• RTX Disclosures: https://rtx.meta.security/bugs

• RTX in WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-red-team-x-vulnerabilities/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06

• Vlad Intro 1:55

• Red Teaming 2:43

• Staying up-to-date 6:34

• Different team colours 10:02

• Defence-in-depth 12:44

• Red Team X 15:57

• Hardware v Software 19:43

• Focus areas 21:29

• Prioritising requests 22:44

• Notable RTX Disclosures 26:05

• Vulnerability disclosure policy 28:52

• Getting into offensive security 38:48

• Outro 40:51

In this episode Mihaela joins Pascal for the intro to discuss the latest news in Facebook open source including Litho and Flipper. We then move on to the interview in which Pascal chats with Alisa and Stef who work on AR Studio and AR Engine, two products that allow creatives to build effects for various Facebook apps. Tune in to hear how Alisa and Stef ended up in their current roles, how a feature makes it from inception into a product at Facebook, and how the community feedback is taken into account.

For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com.

We’re jumping into our time machine and going back to 2018 for an interview with Will B. about the various twists and turns that led to the creation of Instagram Stories. We will be back with a fresh interview next month.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Rebound: https://github.com/facebookarchive/rebound
• Origami Studio: https://origami.design/

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Will Bailey 1:14

• Early FB iOS app 7:16

• Release Trains 11:52

• The End of HTML5 13:29

• Migration to Native 16:05

• Facebook Home 17:02

• Design Collaboration 22:03

• Instagram 26:33

• Slingshot 27:57

• Instagram for Android 29:54

• Instagram Stories 35:37

• Rebound 41:25

• Outro 44:41

Chiara is a Product Manager who supports the Workplace team. She joins Pascal and Mihaela on episode 12 to give some clarity on the role of a Product Manager. With a background in graphic design, she tells us about her journey to becoming a Product Manager and the skills and mindset she practices in this role. If you enjoy the business aspect of a project and you're someone who can coordinate understanding a problem and identifying a path to the solution, being a Product Manager will fit you like a glove. Tune in to hear from Chiara herself!

Projects discussed

• Fresco: https://frescolib.org/
• Flipper: https://fbflipper.com/
• Aroma: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/aroma-ml-for-code-recommendation/
• Workplace: https://workplace.com/

Timestamps

The basic version of Threads for web was built in just under three months by two engineers, mirroring the nimble engineering practices we talked about on this podcast before when it came to launching Threads for Android and iOS. In this episode, Pascal is joined by Ally and Kevin, two engineers on the Threads Web team. They talk about how shared infrastructure with other Meta web properties allows them to move fast and how they manage to balance the need to ship new features with the desire to craft delightful experiences for their users. 

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Threads: https://threads.net

• StyleX: https://stylexjs.com/ 

• FlowJS: https://flow.org/ 

• Introducing Meta Llama 3: https://ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llama-3/

• Building custom silicon for the future of AI: https://www.metacareers.com/life/building-custom-silicon-for-the-future-of-ai

• Building Meta’s GenAI Infrastructure: https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/12/data-center-engineering/building-metas-genai-infrastructure/ 

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Intro Ally and Kevin 1:44

• Why focus on Web? 2:48

• Kevin's contributions 4:42

• Focus on craft 6:18

• Editing Threads 7:34

• Ally's contributions 10:40

• Prioritising delight and shipping features 12:02

• Launching Threads Web 13:30

• Shared Infra 16:13

• Tech Stack 19:15

• The DevX of Meta www 23:51

• Challenges 30:57

• Favourite bit of polish 34:32

• Outtakes 39:18

We don’t know when but at some point in the future we will face what researchers call a "Quantum Apocalypse". This is when quantum computers will be able to break many of our existing encryption algorithms. To keep Meta’a users safe even from attacks that don’t even exist today, Sheran and Rafael are working on post-quantum-ready encryption. Tune in to learn about the various challenges and trade offs that this work brings with it.  

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Post-quantum readiness for TLS at Meta: https://engineering.fb.com/2024/05/22/security/post-quantum-readiness-tls-pqr-meta/ 

• Fizz TLS implementation: https://github.com/facebookincubator/fizz 

• liboqs: https://github.com/open-quantum-safe/liboqs 

• NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Submissions: https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/post-quantum-cryptography/post-quantum-cryptography-standardization/round-3-submissions 

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Meta Open Source 101 1:10

• Intros 1:49

• Sheran Intro 2:31

• Rafael Intro 3:37

• Then Quantum Apocalypse 5:24

• Why symmetric and asymmetric algos behave differently 8:10

• Why invest in tomorrow's problems? 9:21

• First deployment target 14:17

• Choosing an algorithm 18:06

• Choosing the right parameters 19:51

• Performance costs and wins 21:28

• Stack 23:33

• Challenges 25:26

• What's next for PQC? 30:38

• Working with NIST 32:59

• Outro 34:30

• Outtakes 35:43

Every day, trillions of image download requests are made from Meta’s family of apps. Zuzanna works on the Media Platform Team that owns the entire flow from serving images from the CDN to displaying the pixels on your phone. One of the project she and her team recently worked on was rolling out HDR images to Instagram and Threads and in this episode’s interview, Zuzanna tells show host Pascal how they partnered with large phone manufacturers to develop and roll out the new feature.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Fresco: https://frescolib.org/ 

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Intro Zuza 1:44

• Image Infra Team 3:23

• The scale of images at Meta 5:10

• Measuring quality 10:01

• HDR photos 12:13

• HDR file formats 19:02

• HDR photo availability today 22:34

• Partnering with phone vendors 30:40

• Why photos after videos? 32:27

• Outro 36:22

For the second time in just a few months, we are talking Python on the Meta Tech Podcast. Python 3.12 features a whole range of new features, many of which were contributed by Meta. Carl and Itamar join Pascal to talk about their contributions to the latest release, including new hooks that allow for custom JITs like Cinder, Immortal Objects, improvements to the type system, faster comprehensions and much more. In their discussion, they talk not just about how and why those features were built but also the process of upstreaming and engaging with the community. 

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• “Lazy is the new fast: How Lazy Imports and Cinder accelerate machine learning at Meta” - https://engineering.fb.com/2024/01/18/developer-tools/lazy-imports-cinder-machine-learning-meta/

• “How Meta built the infrastructure for Threads” - https://engineering.fb.com/2023/12/19/core-infra/how-meta-built-the-infrastructure-for-threads/

• Cinder on GitHub - https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder

• “Meta contributes new features to Python 3.12” - https://engineering.fb.com/2023/10/05/developer-tools/python-312-meta-new-features/

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Carl Intro 2:09

• Itamar Intro 3:27

• Teams and Missions 5:10

• Python 3

• Faster Coroutines 8:57

• Code Watchers and JIT Hooks 12:10

• When to upstream 13:53

• How to upstream to CPython 16:19

• History of Cinder 21:35

• Why not upstream Cinder? 25:48

• Cinder hooks in CPython 29:34

• Free Threading 34:10

• Outro 37:08

Ryan and his team found a quick way of reducing the compute resources spent on encoding videos for Instagram by 94%, but that was actually the easy part. Tune in to learn what the fix was and how you roll out changes that can affect the user experience of billions of users.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy and https://mastodon.social/@passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• Reducing Instagram’s basic video compute time by 94 percent - Meta Engineering Blog: https://engineering.fb.com/2022/11/04/video-engineering/instagram-video-processing-encoding-reduction/ 
• The Diff: https://thediffpodcast.com/
• Unix Signals in Production - Dangers and Pitfalls: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2022/09/27/signals-in-prod-dangers-and-pitfalls/
• Introducing Velox: An open source unified execution engine - https://engineering.fb.com/2022/08/31/open-source/velox/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Intro Ryan 1:40
• Transcoding Video at Instagram 2:52
• Codecs and Tradeoffs 5:33
• Client Support 7:13
• Where did the compute go? 9:15
• ABR 10:59
• Progressive/Non-ABR Encodings 12:31
• Saving Encoding Time 13:10
• Testing the Changes 17:39
• Results 26:43
• Popularity Predictions 28:32
• Outro 36:31

For the 10th episode of Inside Facebook Mobile, you can listen to Tal, a Technical Program Manager based in the Tel Aviv Facebook office, who joins Pascal and Mihaela to talk about Facebook Lite. Tal discusses the challenges of building, maintaining and releasing an app that has tight constraints of memory, network and disk usage in sight. You'll learn about what Facebook Lite is, why it's important to make it easy for everyone to be able to access it from their phones and you'll hear interesting insight about how phone constraints change how someone accesses internet services. For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile, Instagram at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com.

Topic Discussed

• Spectrum: https://code.fb.com/android/spectrum/
• Docusaurus: https://docusaurus.io/
• Top Developer Tools: https://stackshare.io/posts/top-developer-tools-2018
• PyTorch: https://pytorch.org/

Time Stamps

• Intro 00:00:00
• Open Source News 00:00:21
• Tal Intro 00:02:13
• Tal's Background 00:03:11
• What's a TPM? 00:03:22
• What's FBLite? 00:05:46
• Why does FBLite matter? 00:07:07
• FBLite rendering infrastructure 00:07:50
• Challenges besides size 00:09:11
• Release cadence 00:11:00
• Libraries used in FBLite 00:11:33
• Developer relations within FB 00:12:29
• International work hours 00:16:36
• Feature parity 00:18:47
• Usage patterns in emerging markets 00:21:34
• Release trains 00:25:00
• Flipper plugins 00:27:01
• Tel Aviv FB Office 00:27:34
• Outro 00:29:44
• Bloopers 00:33:54

msys is the technology that underpins most of the messaging products Meta offers. What started as a small library in C wrapping sqlite is now used by many teams across the company and is now trying to address the developer experiences challenges that arise from the initial focus on speed and size above all else. Tune in to Pascal's interview to learn how Akshay and Chris are tackling this and other thorny issues. 

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• Meta Tech Podcast Episode 37: Faster and Smaller Messenger for With Amy
• Meta Tech Podcast Episode 39: White Labeling Messenger for iOS with Amy
• Project LightSpeed: Rewriting the Messenger codebase for a faster, smaller, and simpler messaging app

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Introduction Chris 1:33
• Introduction Akshay 2:54
• msys overview 3:37
• Products adopting msys 7:16
• Building features with msys 13:06
• Migrations 20:28
• Optimising DevX 26:38
• Web Client 33:30
• What's Next for msys 34:40
• Outro 36:50
• Outtakes 37:45

In this episode, Pascal and Mihaela chat with Emma about Redex, an open-source bytecode optimiser for Android apps. Emma talks about the importance and trade-offs of such optimisations and walks us through the basic steps of how Redex works and the different types of detection patterns it uses. If you are interested in trying Redex for yourself or curious to know how it's different than other similar tools, Emma discusses how to adopt Redex in your app and how to write your own detection pattern.

For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com.

Topics discussed

• Redex: https://fbredex.com/
• Sparta: https://github.com/facebook/redex/tree/master/sparta
• Proguard: https://www.guardsquare.com/en/products/proguard
• Facebook Open Source year-in-review: https://code.fb.com/open-source/open-source-2018/
• Spectrum: https://github.com/facebookincubator/spectrum
• Droidcon SF Talk about Spectrum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb5H6_vCEok
• Mozjpeg: https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg/
• PyTorch: https://pytorch.org/
• Github 2018 review: https://octoverse.github.com/projects
• PyTorch 1.0: https://code.fb.com/ai-research/pytorch-developer-ecosystem-expands-1-0-stable-release/

Time Codes

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• Rachel Nabors on The Diff: https://thediffpodcast.com/docs/episode-12
• Meet the Developers: Mobile Edition (Pritesh Nandgaonkar): https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2022/05/23/meet-the-developers-pritesh-nandgaonkar/
• Meta Open Source on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FacebookOpenSource
• Meta Tech Podcast Episode 29: Design Systems with Sriram: https://pca.st/u8r4u6h6
• Meta Tech Podcast Episode 9: Android Bytecode Optimisation with Emma https://pca.st/J3cn 

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• The Diff: Episode 12 1:23
• Meet The Developer: Prish 1:38
• Meta Open Source on YouTube 2:01
• Intro 2:26
• Intro Maria 2:36
• Craft in FB App 5:15
• Metrics vs People? 6:40
• Unquantifiable Quality Goals 10:14
• Dropping Facial Recognition 11:38
• Dynamic Goals in a Dynamic World 13:21
• Driving Cultural Change 15:49
• Average vs Power Users 18:53
• Metrics for Quality 22:33
• Dev Tools' Role for Quality 29:12
• Supporting People at Meta 33:38
• Most Exciting Upcoming Change 39:25
• Outro 40:43
• Bloopers 42:00

Once a year, Facebook invites developers from various companies to a cosy place somewhere in East London to talk for a day about scaling challenges on mobile. This year, Mihaela and Pascal join the fun and talk to a bunch of the attendees, which are for the first time not (all) Facebook employees. Tune in to learn how Deliveroo are moving from Java to Kotlin, the BBC is using their app to find a more inclusive audience, how Asos moved away from never-ending feature branches and much more.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Topics Discussed

mvfst-rl: https://github.com/facebookresearch/mvfst-rl
The Diff: https://thediffpodcast.com/
Tech & Society with Mark Zuckerberg: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-society-with-mark-zuckerberg/id1460731098

Timestamps

• Intro 0:00
• mvfst-rl 0:40
• The Diff 1:20
• Tech & Society 1:53
• London Mobile Forum 2:19
• Sophie Interview - The Guardian 4:48
• Andrew Interview - BBC 7:17
• Ana Interview - Deliveroo 10:03
• Kateryna Interview - Magic Lab 13:20
• Stefano Interview - Asos 19:33
• Adiba Interview - Moody Month 23:29
• Pasquale Interview - Facebook/Litho 29:43
• Maria Interview - Deliveroo 34:24
• Abdul Interview - Deliveroo 39:36
• Outro 44:57
• Bloopers 47:28

PyTorch is now one of the most popular machine learning frameworks out there but that was not a foregone conclusion when it was released in 2016. Our host Pascal is joined by Suraj, a developer advocate here at Meta, to dissect the history of PyTorch and look at the factors that contributed to its success. That includes understanding your target audience, maintaining backwards compatibility, fostering a helpful community and so much more.

 You don't need to be an expert in PyTorch to enjoy the discussion as Suraj explains all the basics.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy and https://mastodon.social/@passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• Meta Open Source Blog: Creating Safe Spaces for Underrepresented Individuals in Open Source Communities - https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2023/05/31/creating-safe-spaces/ 

• PyTorch Developer Podcast - https://pytorch-dev-podcast.simplecast.com/

• PyTorch - https://pytorch.org/ 

• PyTorch on GitHub - https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch

• Announcing the PyTorch Foundation: A new era for the cutting-edge AI framework - https://ai.facebook.com/blog/pytorch-foundation/

Timestamps:

• • Intro 0:05

  • Suraj Intro 1:52

  • What is PyTorch? 4:39

  • History of PyTorch 5:33

  • Choosing a Target Audience 7:27

  • Python and Performance 11:20

  • Design Decisions 19:04

  • OSS Governance and Community 21:11

  • PyTorch 2.0 25:47

  • How to get started 28:32

  • Outro 30:14

  • Bloopers 32:16

For the third and final episode focusing on UI quality, Pascal is joined by Sara, Patrik and Aaron to discuss how design reviews happen at Facebook. Instead of looking at static screenshots alongside the code, reviews now include a dynamic representation of the view hierarchy that not only allows for inspection of properties but also directly highlights violations of Facebook's design standards for accessibility and usability. Learn how all of this grew out of a tool suite originally built for the web and much more in episode 32 of Inside Facebook Mobile.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/insidefbmobile), Instagram (https://instagram.com/insidefbmobile) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out http://fb.com/careers.

Links:

• Podcast: Boz to the Future - https://tech.fb.com/introducing-boz-to-the-future-a-new-podcast-series-from-facebook-reality-labs/
• Facebook Open Source on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCQY962PmHabTjaHv2wJzfQ
• IFBM 29: Design Systems with Sriram - https://pca.st/u8r4u6h6
• IFBM 30: Linting for Design Quality with Elle - https://pca.st/q336vyxe
• Sapienz: https://engineering.fb.com/2018/05/02/developer-tools/sapienz-intelligent-automated-software-testing-at-scale/
• Jest - https://jestjs.io/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:05
• News: Boz To The Future 0:43
• News: FBOSS ELI5 on YouTube 1:26
• Interview Teaser 1:50
• Interview Greeting 2:48
• Sara Intro 3:10
• Aaron Intro 4:15
• Patrik Intro 4:43
• UI Quality Team Mission 5:39
• Shift Left Initiative 6:40
• History of Quality Linting 8:08
• Linting on Mobile 9:29
• UIQR 15:17
• Designer Diff Review 18:17
• E2E Testing with Jest 25:55
• Sapienz 27:12
• UI Quality Scoring 29:17
• Outro 41:16
• Blooper 41:57

Bento is Meta’s internal distribution of Jupyter Notebooks, an open-source web-based computing platform. Host Pascal is joined by Steve who worked with his team on building many features on top of Jupyter, including scheduled notebooks, sharing with colleagues and running notebooks without a remote server component by leveraging Webassembly in the browser.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Scheduling Jupyter Notebooks at Meta: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/08/29/security/scheduling-jupyter-notebooks-meta/

• Serverless Jupyter Notebooks at Meta: https://engineering.fb.com/2024/06/10/data-infrastructure/serverless-jupyter-notebooks-bento-meta/

• Jupyter Notebooks: https://jupyter.org/ 

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Who is Steve? 1:49

• What are Jupyter and Bento? 2:48

• Who is Bento for? 3:40

• Internal-only Bento features 4:42

• Scheduled notebooks 11:39

• Integrating with existing batch jobs 17:10

• The case for serverless notebooks 20:59

• Enter wasm 24:29

• Upgrade paths from serverless to server 26:29

• Bringing more Python libraries to the browser 30:21

• Adding magick(s) 31:52

• DataFrame magic and AI 36:41

• What's next? 38:29

• Outro 43:17

For this last episode of 2024, Pascal talks with Devi, an AI research director at Meta. They talk about the history of AI at Meta, some of the basic terms, how Meta's approach to developing and using AI differs notably from other companies and what the future has in store.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Meta AI Blog: https://ai.meta.com/

• Purple Llama: https://ai.meta.com/blog/purple-llama-open-trust-safety-generative-ai/

• AI Alliance: https://ai.meta.com/blog/ai-alliance/

• Audiobox: https://ai.meta.com/blog/audiobox-generating-audio-voice-natural-language-prompts/

• Emu Video and Emu Edit: https://ai.meta.com/blog/emu-text-to-video-generation-image-editing-research/

• Meta AI Agents: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/09/introducing-ai-powered-assistants-characters-and-creative-tools/

Timestamps

• Intro 0:00

• Introduction Devi 2:27

• AI vs ML 4:00

• History of AI at Meta 6:03

• Deep learning and LLMs 9:32

• LLMs vs GenAI 11:42

• Multi-modal models 12:21

• Meta's AI agents 14:33

• Meta's open approach to AI 16:53

• Image and video generation and editing 22:28

• Most exciting future AI developments 27:17

• Outro 28:57

Episode 14 introduces Adam, the first dedicated iOS developer that Mihaela and Pascal have hosted on the podcast. Adam created ComponentKit, an iOS open-source framework inspired by React, and he joins this episode to tell the story of how the framework was built and adopted. Adam shares some insight on API design considerations, how to build frameworks around scalability and correctness and what the current challenges of working on the Facebook iOS apps are. Before you hear all about this, Daniel gives a special bite-sized intro to Spectrum, an open-source image processing library for Android and iOS, so this episode is one that can’t be missed!

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Topics

• Spectrum: https://libspectrum.io/
• ComponentKit: https://componentkit.org/
• ReactNative updates: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2019/06/12/react-native-open-source-update

Timestamps

In this episode we interview Mihaela who works on the Native UI Frameworks team. We talk about Litho and Sections and how open source at Facebook works.

Projects discussed:

• Litho and Sections: https://fblitho.com/
• Infer static analyzer: http://fbinfer.com/
• Redex: http://fbredex.com/
• Multithreaded rendering on Android with Litho and Infer: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1985913448333055/multithreaded-rendering-on-android-with-litho-and-infer/

Please send feedback to mobilepodcasts@fb.com or reach out to Pascal and Emil directly.

Distributing binaries and toolchains to developers is a pain but DotSlash makes it a breeze. Instead of committing large, platform-specific executables to your repository, DotSlash combines a fast Rust program with a JSON manifest prefixed with a #! to transparently fetch and execute the binary you need. Tune in to our interview with Andres and Michael to learn more.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Simple Precision Time Protocol at Meta: https://engineering.fb.com/2024/02/07/production-engineering/simple-precision-time-protocol-sptp-meta/ 

• Meta Time libraries on GitHub: https://github.com/facebook/time 

• DotSlash - Simplified executable deployment: https://engineering.fb.com/2024/02/06/developer-tools/dotslash-simplified-executable-deployment/ 

• DotSlash website: https://dotslash-cli.com/ 

• DotSlash on GitHub: https://github.com/facebook/dotslash 

Timestamps

• Intro 0:05

• Intro Andres 2:30

• Intro Michael 3:39

• Andres's Projects at Meta 3:54

• Michael's Projects at Meta 5:00

• What is DotSlash? 5:30

• DotSlash vs LFS 6:04

• DotSlash vs buck2 run 7:08

• Where is DotSlash used at Meta? 8:45

• How does DotSlash work? 9:37

• DotSlash on Windows 13:15

• How DotSlash is built 16:21

• Bundling the rust toolchain 17:14

• Automated DotSlash file generation 20:33

• DotSlash and remote execution 24:53

• Storage providers 26:27

• Why open-source? 30:05

• Limitations 34:17

• Cache Eviction 36:59

• Outro 39:22

• Bloopers 40:15

Ever wondered how the culture of big companies like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon differ? Jay comes with a fairly unique perspective as he has now worked at all three of them. In his discussion with Pascal, he shares his views on the trade-offs that a company value like “Move Fast” brings along and how companies assign different weights to the value of making mistakes.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• Power On: The Story of Xbox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJYsA1jXf60

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Jay Introduction 1:18
• Business Engineering at Meta 2:43
• Social Impact 5:35
• Culture Shocks 8:24
• The Value of Mistakes 14:15
• Finding your Pace 16:14
• Modes of Working in Different Teams 19:32
• Expectations vs Reality 23:36
• Workflows 30:02
• Incidents 37:26
• Internal Mobility 42:24
• Outro 45:30
• Bloopers 46:10

“What’s Facebook’s mobile architecture?” is a question we hear often. Instead of top-down MVC, MVW or MVVM, Facebook delegates the responsibility of choosing the right architectural patterns down to the engineers working on products.

This episode's guests Yuan and Dustin pick up where Fabio left us in episode 28 and explain how the Product Foundation org builds abstractions that give engineers autonomy when they want and constraints for features to work cross-app when they need it.

Links:

• IFBM 14 - Facebook iOS UI Infrastructure with Adam: https://pca.st/0qu2
• IFBM 28: Modularising iOS Apps with Fabio: https://pca.st/episode/be165e38-74f3-449f-889a-eab14316c6ed
• Codemod: https://github.com/facebookarchive/codemod
• Fastmod: https://github.com/facebookincubator/fastmod
• ComponentKit: https://componentkit.org/
• Litho: https://fblitho.com/
• React Native: https://reactnative.dev/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Guest introductions 2:19
• App Architecture 6:49
• Codemodding 31:18
• Shared Architectural Concepts 33:06
• Building for Newsfeed 34:59
• Scrolling Lists 41:41
• Outro 55:43
• Bloopers 56:36

Keeping engineers effective is not a small task when you work at Meta’s scale. Many of the tools you take for granted simply break or become unbearably slow. Chandrika’s team looks after developer experience at Meta and takes a holistic approach that spans the editing experience (IDEs, editors), builds, continuous integration and even custom calendar tooling. Her team ensures that as new platforms, for instance AR/VR, and languages like Swift and Kotlin emerge, our infrastructure is ready.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/insidefbmobile), Instagram (https://instagram.com/insidefbmobile) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://facebookcareers.com.

Links:

• The Diff Podcast: https://thediffpodcast.com/docs/episode-10/
• Meta Connect Keynote: https://fb.watch/9YydoWHMEE/
• Jest: https://jestjs.io/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• News: The Diff is back 1:25
• Chandrika before Meta 1:50
• Meta vs other Megacorps 9:57
• DevEx at Meta 12:05
• Different Dev Infra Teams 23:18
• Unexpected Challenges 26:45
• Kotlin & Swift 30:34
• Measuring Developer Experience 35:53
• App Health & Perf 37:46
• Cross-App Dev 40:12
• Outro 42:17

The most recent IPCC report has reiterated that the climate crisis is an all hands on deck situation. We all need to think about the impact our actions have on the planet that provides our life support system. Ramya is a TPM on the Meta AI team and analyses the impact AI has, as it grows superlinearly, on energy use and carbon emissions. Her recent work on Green AI identifies ways for reducing that footprint without limiting the options engineers have for building great products for connecting people. Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.   Acronyms:

• LCA: Life Cycle Assessment
• PUE: Power Usage Efficiency

Links:

• Sustainable AI: Environmental Implications, Challenges and Opportunities: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00364
• Make an Impact for Earth Day: https://about.fb.com/news/2022/04/make-an-impact-for-earth-day/
• Green AI SchrepTech: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/how-ai-is-helping-address-the-climate-crisis/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:05
• Intro Ramya 2:13
• The Cost of AI 3:05
• Measuring AI's Carbon Footprint 11:00
• Trade Offs 13:28
• Calculating the Carbon Intensity 16:01
• Mitigation Options 18:36
• Cultural Changes 25:35
• Societal Value 26:13
• Running AI on Edge Devices 29:02
• What's Next? 32:33
• Outro 34:55

Lillian joins Mihaela and Pascal in this episode to talk about Facebook Stories and how it took shape from a new sharing surface developed by three engineers to the mature product it is today. You'll learn about the challenges her team faced while trying to scale Stories from a prototype and the performance implications of introducing new types of content as well as functionality at the top of News Feed. If you've listened to our previous episode featuring Balazs, who's been an engineering manager for some time, you can now hear about this role from the perspective of someone who's just recently become an engineering manager and is now going through the transition from an Android engineer to a manager.

For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com.

Projects discussed:

- React Native: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/
- Log Device: https://logdevice.io/
- Skip: http://skiplang.com/
- Litho: https://fblitho.com/

After many years on Workplace, Amy recently switched teams and now works on Lexical, "an extensible text editor library that does things differently". To find out why you should get excited about the upcoming open source release of the library, tune in!

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• Lexical: https://lexical.dev/
• Workplace: https://www.workplace.com/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Introducing Amy 1:54
• Joining Workplace 3:54
• Early Days at Facebook for Work iOS 6:38
• Whitelabeling Messenger 8:10
• Project Workspeed 10:23
• msys 14:39
• End-to-End Encryption 17:50
• Workplace Chat for Desktop 19:33
• Unified Editor 24:27
• Lexical 28:01
• Text Rendering Models 34:16
• Outro 37:02

Cami is a developer advocate for Open Source and Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), our AR/VR organisation. In this episode's interview Cami and our host Pascal discuss how developer advocacy is approached at Facebook, how to build developer empathy, and tackle the eternal question of why it's worth investing in Open Source. If you've ever wanted to dip your toes into VR development, stick around for the end when Cami shares some of her favourite resources.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/insidefbmobile), Instagram (https://instagram.com/insidefbmobile) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://facebookcareers.com.

Links:

• Hand Tracking Pirates Demo: https://developer.oculus.com/blog/new-oculus-open-source-library-and-pirates-demo-app-qa-with-developer-luca-mefisto-on-hand-tracking-innovation/
• Hand Physics Lab: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/app/3392175350802835/
• Build Your First VR App with Unity: https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/unity-tutorial/
• Unity VR: https://learn.unity.com/course/oculus-vr
• Cami on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cwillycs?s=09
• ValemVR on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ValemVR
• Oculus on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/oculusvr
• Facebook Open Source on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FacebookOpenSource
• Traveling While Black: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/go/1994117610669719/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Cami Intro 1:21
• What is developer advocacy? 4:08
• Developer empathy 9:45
• Why invest in Open Source? 14:23
• End of life for OSS projects 19:57
• AR/VR abstractions 22:42
• Becoming an expert learner 32:21
• VR dev learning resources 37:56
• Most underrated FB OSS project 43:06
• Outro 46:25

Episode 15 features a topic that might sound familiar to you if you've listened to previous editions of Inside Facebook Mobile. It's a project that provides such value to developers that it keeps coming up in discussions with engineers working in many different areas at Facebook. Ezgi has a long-awaited converstion with Mihaela and Pascal about Infer, an open-source static analysis tool with support for Java and C-based languages. Ezgi joined Infer as a natural extension of her PhD in programming languages and type systems. You'll not only hear from her about writing and testing a new analyses for Infer, but also what it's like to balance academic research with having applied industry impact. We're sure you'll stay tuned until the end!

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Topics

• Infer: https://fbinfer.com/
• Getafix: https://code.fb.com/developer-tools/getafix-how-facebook-tools-learn-to-fix-bugs-automatically/
• Litho: http://fblitho.com
• Fresco: https://frescolib.org/
• Flipper: https://fbflipper.com/
• Lightweight Multi-Language Syntax Transformation with Parser Parser Combinators: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rvantond/pdfs/ppc-pldi-2019.pdf

Timestamps

For our second special for Earth Week, we are talking to Bilge who works as a research scientist at Meta AI. Her open-source project Carbon Explorer evaluates solutions to make data centres operate on 24/7 renewable energy. Why this is easier said than done and how engineers can help within their day-to-day work to reduce their carbon footprint are among the many things Pascal and Bilge discuss in this episode.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• Carbon Explorer: https://github.com/facebookresearch/CarbonExplorer
• Holistic Approach for Designing Carbon Aware Datacenters: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10036
• Open Catalyst: https://opencatalystproject.org/
• Open Catalyst SchrepTech Interview: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/how-ai-is-helping-address-the-climate-crisis/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:05
• Intro Bilge 2:18
• Optimising for the Environment 4:01
• Carbon Explorer 5:02
• Mitigations for Renewable Intermittency 7:17
• Operational and Embodied Footprints 10:57
• Motivations for Carbon Explorer 13:06
• Battery Storage 14:36
• Renewable Curtailment 15:52
• Empowering Engineers 18:20
• Carbon Intensity APIs 19:22
• AI Carbon Intensity Forecasts 22:07
• Carbon Metrics 23:17
• Where to Learn More 25:38
• Outro 27:32
• Bloopers 29:45

Subodh, a software engineer leading the QUIC team in Menlo Park, joins us for episode 11 and talks with Mihaela and Pascal about Android networking. If you've never given much attention to the network protocols your app is using, listen to Subodh why you should give it a second though. You'll hear about how the Android networking stack has evolved over the years, why zero round-trip time matters on mobile and what it's like to contribute to a network protocol specification (spoiler: it's TLS 1.3). Brush up on your networking knowledge and tune in for this new episode!

For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile, Instagram at insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com.

Topics discussed
- https://www.reactiflux.com/transcripts/react-native-team/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/reactnative/comments/av7vw3/future_ama_the_react_native_team_will_be_hosting/
- https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/issues/64#issuecomment-446098249
- https://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2019/03/01/react-native-open-source-update
- https://code.fb.com/developer-tools/mark-harman-harlan-d-mills-award/

Timestamps

Rachel (@rachelnabors) and Pascal (@passy) are back for another interview about Android infrastructure at FB. Thomas joins them to share how the internal Kotlin adoption has progressed since the last time we checked in with Sergey on the topic. In the deeply technical discussion, the three discuss how ABI generation speeds up builds, which Kotlin language features still need to be used with caution and what a plan to 100% Kotlin for Android might look like.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Topics

• React 17: https://reactjs.org/blog/2020/10/20/react-v17.html
• React Native docs update: https://reactnative.dev/blog/2020/07/23/docs-update
• ktfmt: https://github.com/facebookincubator/ktfmt

Timestamps

• Intro 0:00
• News 1:00
• Interview 7:28
• Outro 44:44
• Bloopers 52:29

In this episode, Ariane joins for an in-depth conversation about performance logging. With more than 10 years focusing on this problem, Ariane moved from Facebook Seattle to Facebook London and started a team with other engineers that are as passionate about this subject as she is. You'll hear about why instrumenting performance markers is important for a healthy app, what makes a good metric and how to build sustainable logging systems. If you're just getting started with performance logging, tune in to hear Ariane's advice on how to get started. For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com.

Projects discussed:

- QNNPack: https://code.fb.com/ml-applications/qnnpack/
- StateService: https://code.fb.com/open-source/stateservice/
- Profilo: https://facebookincubator.github.io/profilo/
- Litho: https://fblitho.com/

Facebook has a unique recruitment model. Instead of being assigned to one team, you first end up in Bootcamp, where you learn how the company functions and our tools and frameworks work. Then you get to look for teams, work with them and decide which one to join. Because the team selection is decoupled from hiring, switching teams is easy. In this episode, we’re talking to Sash who has been taking advantage of internal mobility by switching teams every year almost on the dot. Over the course of his career at Facebook, he has worked on iOS animations, Android hardware and most recently the Wrist-based human-computer interaction interface that is being developed by FRL Labs.

Links:

• Inside Facebook Reality Labs: Wrist-based interaction for the next computing platform: https://tech.fb.com/inside-facebook-reality-labs-wrist-based-interaction-for-the-next-computing-platform/
• Boz To The Future: https://www.facebook.com/boztothefuturepod
• Keyframes Animation Library: https://github.com/facebookarchive/Keyframes
• IFBM 30: Linting for Design Quality with Elle: https://pca.st/episode/1e22130d-88a5-4ea9-a968-692cac232a78
• IFBM 31: Intentional Architecture with Yuan and Dustin: https://pca.st/episode/2199bc68-2287-41b7-aa45-ab52595e1c62
• Richie's Plank Experience: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/1642239225880682/

Timestamps:

Intro 0:06

Joining FB 1:52

News Feed Delight 4:20

Switch to Hardware 13:25

Hackamonth 19:27

AOSP Engineering 22:07

Hardware Prototyping at FRL 24:50

Developing for VR and Favourite Experiences 30:35

Outro 36:52

Bloopers 37:44

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• Coursera Datastructures and Algorithms classes: https://www.coursera.org/courses?query=data%20structures%20and%20algorithms
• Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Introduction Kevin 1:22
• Learning to Code 3:38
• Learning Resources 12:50
• Deciding When to Stop 16:42
• Interview Prep 21:57
• The Big Day 24:45
• Dealing With Imposter Syndrome 29:53
• Interviewing is Broken 38:41
• Outro 40:52

Every time we get to talk about an open-source project on our podcast, we couldn't be happier. This episode we have Marc to talk about Hermes, an open-source JavaScript engine, optimised for running React Native apps on Android. You can listen to Marc explain why it was necessary to build a JavaScript engine to support the needs of a particular framework and get a glimpse of the architecture and the design decisions behind it. Tune in now for episode 17!

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Topics Discussed

Hermes: https://hermesengine.dev/
React Native: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/hermes

Timestamps

• Intro 00:05
• Interview: Marc 00:57
• Hermes Overview 02:25
• Design Tradeoffs 07:01
• Garbage Collector 11:56
• Feature Omissions 15:36
• Hermes Technical Design 17:35
• Developer Experience 19:23
• What's Next? 20:15
• Using Hermes Without RN 21:32
• Outro 22:28
• Bloopers 00:25:50

We just released Sonar, an extensible mobile app debugger. In this Episode Pascal interviews Emil who started the project 18 months ago about what inspired him to build it and how Sonar is used across Facebook today.

Join us for this episode where Pascal and Fabio interview one of Facebook’s new joiners: Rachel is a developer advocate on the React Core team in London.

React is one of the biggest open source UI frameworks in the world, a reputation kept sustainable especially thanks to the amazing work the React Core team puts into the educational material available to the community.

Rachel shares her journey from cartoonist to developer advocacy roles to the present day, where she curates and maintains documentation material built for people rather than just coders.

How to find the missing or next chapter of your docs? How to measure success? This and much more in episode 16.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Topics

• Dev Tools Challenger: http://devtoolschallenger.com/
• React: https://reactjs.org
• React Native: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/
• Docusaurus: https://docusaurus.io
• ComponentKit: https://componentkit.org
• Flipper: https://fbflipper.com
• Web Animations API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Animations_API
• MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
• Rachel’s Web Animation Docs: http://rachelnabors.com/waapi
• Rachel’s book on UI Animation: https://abookapart.com/products/animation-at-work
• Rachel’s courses on CSS Animation and Cartooning: https://courses.rachelnabors.com/
• Inclusive speech linter: https://alexjs.com/

Timestamps

For the first time, Rachel and Pascal are joined by a guest from WhatsApp. Silky walks the two through a staggering array of optimisations WhatsApp deploy to make sure that text, media and documents arrive quickly, reliably and safely on the other end. They discuss going from five to six nines of reliability for Facebook’s distributed blob store, POPs, FNAs, and fighting abuse on an end-to-end encrypted platform. As ever, before the interview, Pascal and Rachel discuss some news from the Open Source world, including React Native documentation updates, an exciting contracting opportunity on the Docusaurus project and the latest Facebook Open Source statistics.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Topics

• React Native Docs: https://reactnative.dev/docs/getting-started
• Docusaurus Contract: https://profacebook.applytojob.com/apply/hZPoVr1Eoj/Front-End-Engineer-V
• Open source year 2019 in review: https://engineering.fb.com/open-source/open-source-2019/
• Evolution of WhatsApp within Facebook’s data centers: https://atscaleconference.com/videos/evolution-of-whatsapp-within-facebooks-data-centers/
• WhatsApp on how it’s fighting bulk messaging and fake accounts: https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/06/whatsapp-on-how-its-fighting-bulk-messaging-and-fake-accounts/
• How WhatsApp Reduced Spam for Over 1 Billion People: https://developers.facebook.com/videos/f8-2017/how-whatsapp-reduced-spam-for-over-1-billion-people/

Timestamps

• Intro    0:05
• News: React Native Docs    1:02
• News: Docusaurus Contractor    1:52
• News: Open Source in Review 2019    3:10
• Interview with Silky    5:05
• Sharding Graph Databases    6:10
• Getting into CompSci    7:45
• Scaling an Exabyte Blob Store    9:00
• Benefits of Shared Infrastructure    13:46
• Going from 5 to 6 Nines    17:19
• POPs    18:09
• ISP-Level Caches    19:19
• Making WhatsApp New-Year-Safe    22:13
• Fighting Encrypted Abuse at WhatsApp    25:00
• Encrypted Media Forwarding    32:45
• ML Teams at FB    35:42
• Transition to Management (and Back)    37:37
• Outro    43:56
• Aftershow/Outtakes    48:55
• Harley Quinn: Birds Of Prey    50:59

At Meta, engineers are our biggest asset which is why we have an entire org tasked with making them as productive as possible. But how do you know if your projects for improving developer experience are actually successful? For any other product, you would run an A/B test but that requires metrics and how do you measure developer productivity? Sarita and Moritz have been working on exactly that with Diff Authoring Time which measures how long it took to submit a change to our codebase. Host Pascal talks to them about the way this is implemented, the challenges and abilities this unlocks.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

You can follow our guest Moritz on X (https://x.com/Inventitech) or check out his website on inventitech.com.

Links

• Meta Connect 2024: https://www.meta.com/en-gb/connect/

Timestamps

• Episode intro 0:05

• Sarita Intro 2:33

• Moritz Intro 3:44

• DevInfra as an Engineer 4:25

• DevInfra as a Data Scientist 5:12

• Why DevEx Metrics? 6:04

• Average Diff Authoring Time at Meta 9:55

• Events for calculating DAT 10:55

• Edge cases 13:15

• DAT for Performance Evaluation? 20:29

• Analyses on DAT data 22:29

• Onboarding to DAT 23:23

• Stat-sig data 25:06

• Validating the metric 26:34

• Versioning metrics 28:09

• Detecting and handling biases 29:19

• Diff coverage 30:30

• Do we need DevX metrics in an AI software engineering world? 31:23

• Measuring the impact of AI tools 32:23

• What's next for DAT? 33:40

• Outtakes 36:22

Cami returns to the Meta Tech Podcast, with now having 18 months of AR/VR experience under her belt. Cami is excited to share what developers can now do on the Quest platform. In this episode, Pascal and Cami discuss new SDKs for motion controls, voice and spatial objects; and for creators without programming experience - there’s Horizon Worlds. 

Cami, as a Developer Advocate, shares her expertise whilst being acutely aware of areas that require careful consideration.

To find out more from Cami and the exciting updates on Quest, tune into episode 43 of the Meta Tech Podcast.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links:

• Display prototypes on Zuck’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/4/videos/355247026677540/
• Boz to the Future on Display Tech: https://www.facebook.com/1681/videos/390455039578133/
• Presence Platform Announcement: https://developer.oculus.com/blog/introducing-presence-platform-unleashing-mixed-reality-and-natural-interaction-for-oculus-developers/?locale=en_GB
• Presence Platform Developer Portal: https://developer.oculus.com/presence-platform/
• Cami on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cwillycs
• Keep talking and nobody explodes: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2010043642376517/?locale=en_GB
• wit.ai: https://wit.ai/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Cami: Reintro 2:01
• Horizon Worlds 3:22
• Presence Platform SDK 7:59
• Voice SDK 12:57
• Insights SDK 17:34
• Next-Gen Displays 24:14
• Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes 28:20
• Building for Horizon 31:37
• ELI5 on YouTube 36:59
• Meta Connect 42:51
• Outro 44:14

After sitting in one too many Zoom meetings looking at flat images of 3D models, mechanical engineers Ed, Jason, Fan, and Raghavan decided that they could do better, taught themselves how to code and started to build Caddy - a CAD app for mixed reality. Tune in to episode 64 to hear their story.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod), Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy, https://mastodon.social/@passy, and https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Caddy video: https://heycaddy.net/

• Caddy on the Quest Store: https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/24212682218375897/ 

• @Scale conference on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd9I8ZkgoR1d7GeSj_wi_LQ 

• MLow @Scale talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ypsZUNRjI4

• MLow blog post: https://engineering.fb.com/2024/06/13/web/mlow-metas-low-bitrate-audio-codec/ 

• Faster Incident Response with GenAI @Scale talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpe7eAR90Ko

• Llama 3: https://llama.meta.com/llama3/

• Meta Unity SDKs: https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/

• Prisms VR: https://www.prismsvr.com/ 

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Ed Intro 2:12

• Raghavan Intro 3:15

• Fan Intro 3:44

• Jason Intro 4:16

• What is Caddy? 4:49

• Why build Caddy? 6:52

• Discovery of hand-based interactions 11:46

• Supported import formats 14:09

• Learning to code 18:09

• Time to Caddy MVP 27:48

• Off-the-shelf components 29:04

• Outgrowing the initial vision 32:48

• AI in Caddy 43:25

• Challenges building Caddy 52:38

• What's next? 55:40

• How to get in touch? 56:56

• Excitement in MR 57:38

• Outro 1:03:35

For episode 51, Pascal speaks with Neil and Marie, two of the engineers behind Buck2, our open source, large scale build system. Thousands of developers at Meta are already using Buck2 and performing millions of builds per day that on average complete in half the time of Buck1 builds. Marie and Neil discuss the design choices that make Buck2 so much faster and the various challenges they faced in engineering and open sourcing the build system.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy and https://mastodon.social/@passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Announcement blog post: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/04/06/open-source/buck2-open-source-large-scale-build-system/

• Buck2: https://buck2.build/

• Buck2 on GitHub: https://github.com/facebook/buck2

• Build Systems à la Carte - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/03/build-systems.pdf 

• Lexical YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpv0BYhhlak

• Lexical for iOS: https://github.com/facebook/lexical-ios

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Intro Marie 1:30

• Intro Neil 2:57

• Why a custom build tool? 4:21

• Rewriting Buck 6:49

• Buck2 vs Bazel 8:49

• Building language support 12:06

• Buck2 as a developer 13:15

• Upgrade from Buck1 to Buck2 15:05

• How is Buck2 faster? 16:31

• Rust and Profiling 18:44

• From Python to Starlark 25:54

• Open-Sourcing 28:18

• Outro 32:15

Garima joins Rachel (@rachelnabors) and Pascal (@passy) to discuss the challenges of building custom layouts for notifications in a fragmented Android ecosystem. They discuss how sampled data helps to ensure that our billions of daily active people get the best possible experience and users on older phones aren’t left behind. If you ever wondered what the “useful” and “not useful” buttons on Facebook notifications actually do and how you clicking on them could help not just you, but all people on Facebook have a better experience, listen in!

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email mobilepodcasts@fb.com, Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06
• Garima early days at FB 1:16
• Notification Infrastructure 5:21
• Outro 46:12
• Bloopers 46:46

This month Emil and Pascal talked to Will Bailey. Will has a long history at Facebook building tactile experiences and open source libraries. Now Will works at Instagram. Apart from hearing about Will's history at Facebook, we focused on the intersection of design and software engineering, something all of us are very passionate about.

Did you know that you can "rage shake" your phone to create a bug report in most Meta apps? If you did, have you ever wondered what happened after you hit submit? In this episode's interview, Pascal talks to Jon about App Health and how his team ensures that despite thousands of engineers shipping code every day, the apps remain reliable and fast.

Got feedback? Send us an email to mobilepodcasts@fb.com, tweet us at @insidefbmobile (https://twitter.com/insidefbmobile), DM us on Instagram (https://instagram.com/insidefbmobile) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://facebookcareers.com.

Links:

• Flipper
• Litho Error Boundaries
• Meet the Rustaceans: Digant Kasundra
• ELI5: Metro - JavaScript Bundler for React Native
• IFBM 7: Performance and lnstrumentation with Ariane
• gCPU Paper: A Real-time Framework for Detecting Efficiency Regressions in a Globally Distributed Codebase

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:06
• Jon Intro 1:30
• App Health Mission 2:58
• Rage Shake & Fly Trap 5:27
• Life of a Regression 8:49
• Experiments and App Health 13:47
• Tracking Down Perf Regressions 16:13
• Soft Errors 18:54
• Favourite Tools 23:35
• Backend Regressions 25:31
• Rolling out a Fix 28:00
• gCPU 29:45
• Wrapping Up 32:12
• Outro 33:20
• Bloopers 34:04