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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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),...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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),...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...