Inside Facebook Mobile: Recent Episodes
Facebook, Inc.
Brought to you by Facebook. In addition to remaining active in the open source community and conference circuit, this podcast offers another channel that allows us to highlight the technical work of our engineers who will discuss everything from low-level frameworks to end-user features. Throughout the podcast, two Facebook engineers, Mihaela Ogrezeanu and Pascal Hartig (@passy), will interview mobile developers in the company.
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.
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.
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.
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. In this episode we cover the first three interviewees talking about coroutines in Kotlin, Fresco and Messenger Lite.
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.
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!
Rachel is a developer advocate in the React Core team on 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Emil and Pascal introduce themselves and tell you about what they've planned for their new podcast.