Meta Tech Podcast

Your smart glasses run all day on a battery narrower than your pinky finger and building it required reinventing how batteries are made. In this episode, Pascal talks to Karthik and Myuran, the engineers behind Meta's steel can battery technology, to explore why traditional pouch cells couldn't cut it for the ultra-slim temple arms of AI glasses like Meta Ray-Bans and the Oakley Vanguards. Tune in...

You've probably spotted those little circles of your friends' faces popping up on Facebook Reels. They look simple enough, but building them was a proper engineering challenge. In this episode, Pascal chats to Joseph and Subasree about Friend Bubbles, a feature that surfaces which of your close friends have been watching and reacting to the same Reels as you. We get into the details of how prefetc...

Have you ever wondered how Meta makes config rollouts safe at scale? In this episode, Pascal sits down with Ishwari and Joe to discuss Meta's approach for propagating changes across services in seconds and discuss why speed increases the need for strong safeguards. Catch the episode to discover canarying and progressive rollouts, the health checks and monitoring signals used to catch regressions e...

At Meta, even seemingly simple engineering tasks—like updating an API—become monumental undertakings when you're dealing with millions of lines of code and thousands of engineers, especially if the changes are security-related. In today's episode, Pascal talks to Alex and Tanu about the challenges and learnings from the journey of making Meta's mobile frameworks more secure at a scale few companie...

It's not just Not Invented Here Syndrome. Some technologies like CSS simply don't scale if you're building some of the largest websites on the planet with thousands of engineers committing to the same code base every day. StyleX is Meta's open-source solution for CSS at scale and allows atomic styling of components while deduplicating definitions for bundle size and exposing a delightfully simple...

You've likely heard of Meta Ray-Ban Display by now — but what's it actually like to work on it? In this episode, Pascal talks to Kenan and Emanuel about the exciting features of Meta's First-Gen Display Glasses and Neural Wristband, the engineering and product challenges they encountered during development, and their vision for future generations of these devices.  Got feedback? Send it to us on T...

In this episode, Pascal talks to Dharmesh J. (DJ) and Lisa about the vision for the open, scalable future of networking hardware for AI and to break down Meta's big announcements from the 2025 Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit. We dive into the OCP ecosystem, explore how AI is used to enhance our carbon modeling, and share our progress toward achieving Net Zero emissions across all scopes by 2030....

How do you keep Android build times under control when your codebase spans tens of thousands of modules and millions of lines of Kotlin? In this episode, Pascal talks with Iveta, Navid, and Joshua from Meta's Android Developer Experience team about the technical strategies that help Meta's engineers stay productive at scale. We discuss approaches like source-only ABIs and incremental compilation –...

Creating 3D assets can be daunting, but does it have to be? Mahima and Rakesh are on a quest to democratize 3D content creation with AssetGen, a foundation model for 3D. They discuss the challenges of training such a model given the scarcity of available data and how large language models have unlocked key solutions. As if that weren't enough, they're also tackling the ambitious goal of generating...

To not leave you without an episode for August, Pascal brings you an episode from the Archive. Back in August 2023 for Episode 55, Pascal spoke 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...

Join Pascal as he explores the groundbreaking world of generic neuromotor interfaces with Jesse, Lauren, and Sean. Discover how these technologies enable control of devices with just a flick of the wrist or even a simple intention to move. We'll discuss the role of AI in eliminating the need for personalised training, the differences between non-invasive interfaces and their predecessors, and the...

What happens when decades-old C code, powering billions of daily messages, starts to slow down innovation? In this episode, we talk to Meta engineers Elaine and Buping, who are in the midst of a bold, incremental rewrite of one of our core messaging libraries—in Rust. Neither came into the project as Rust experts, but both saw a chance to improve not just performance, but developer experience acro...

Pyrefly is a faster, open-source Python type checker written in Rust, succeeding Pyre. But what prompted the rewrite and what besides the language choice ended up making it faster? Host Pascal talks to Maggie, Rebecca and returning guest Neil about the unexpected complexities of building an incremental type checker that scales to mono repositories in episode 75. Got feedback? Send it to us on Thre...

To ensure that everyone has access to resilient, high-speed and low-latency connections to Meta services, no matter where in the world they are, Meta makes large-scale investments into subsea cable infrastructure. The recently announced Project Water worth will, Once complete, reach five major continents and span over 50,000 km (longer than the Earth's circumference), making it the world's longest...

Join Pascal and Sabrina on the latest Meta Tech Podcast episode as they discuss the evolution and future of GraphQL. From client-side consistency to innovative APIs, learn how GraphQL is making developers' lives easier and enhancing user experiences. Discover surprising insights into the challenges of building a mobile GraphQL platform and how it's transforming product development at Meta.  Got fe...

In this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast, host Pascal sits down with Shane, a research scientist at Meta, to explore the cutting-edge research behind Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Shane shares insights from his seven-year journey at Meta, where he focuses on computer vision and multimodal AI within the Wearables AI organization. Tune in to learn how Shane's team is pioneering foundational models for Ray-B...

How do you translate roughly ten million lines of Java code to Kotlin? Clicking in your the IDE gets pretty repetitive after a while and doesn't work if you have custom APIs and requirements for null safety. Eve and Jocelyn, two software engineers on the Mobile Infra Codebases Team have taken on this challenge and talk host Pascal through the unexpected difficulties when embarking on the journey t...

Introducing a new Android UI Framework like Jetpack Compose into an existing app is easy right? Import some AARs and code away. But what if your app has specific performance goals to meet, has existing design components, integrations with navigation and logging frameworks? That is where Summer and her team come in who handle large-scale migrations for Instagram. They aim to provide developers with...

Do types actually make you more productive or is it just more typing for you to do on the keyboard? That's just one of the questions we managed to answer at least on a small scale with Diff Authoring Time or DAT, here at Meta. Want to know how we leverage metrics to run experiments on productivity in our internal codebase? Tune in to episode 69. Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads ( https://thr...

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 i...

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 wi...

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 (...

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...

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....

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/metat...