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...

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...

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),...

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...

The approach we take to building the Facebook app is based around three adjectives: trustworthy, people-centric and unified. In this episode, Pascal talks with Maria who is a director of engineering for product architecture and product excellence. They discuss what it means for a culture that is known for being driven by metrics to become more people-centric. What are examples of metrics that are aligned with people goals and when do they fail to capture them? Tune in to hear the answers to...

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),...

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...

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 Chat. Amy and Pascal discuss the challenges of taking a huge app that is under constant...

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 year smashes the internal interview process. To learn what his thinking behind the change was and...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

You asked for more iOS news, and we listened! Episode 28 of Inside Facebook Mobile features engineer Fabio, and answers the question 'How does Facebook modularise iOS applications?'. Tune in to learn about Buck, Facebook’s monorepo build system, and how it helps developers to define clear module boundaries.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.