Meta Tech Podcast

When Amy joined the Workplace team nearly seven years ago (back then still under the name Facebook for Work), it became clear that it would require a messaging service. While there were already a few options available, none of them was designed to be plugged into a new app. That's when Amy and her team decided to take on white labeling Messenger for iOS to turn it into what would become Workplace...

Kevin has had an unusual career path that led him to an engineering role at Meta. He first joined the company in a sales role before he moved into a more product-focused position. Working closely with engineers, Kevin decides to pursue a career in software development himself. Instead of dropping out of his job to get formal education in the space, he takes online courses and within less than a ye...

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 Pasc...

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...

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@f...

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 th...

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...

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 fo...

"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 aut...

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 r...

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...

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 whi...

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 F...

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 ca...

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...

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 t...

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 cam...

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.

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 enc...

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 a...

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...

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 u...

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 m...

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 t...

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 f...