Meta Tech Podcast

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.

The conference will happen on Saturday, April 25, 2020 and you can register for free at https://womenofreact.com/.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email [email protected], Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

• Women of React: https://womenofreact.com/
• event.Handler() pod: https://eventhandlerpod.com/
• Board Game Arena: https://boardgamearena.com/

• 0:00 - Intro
• 1:54 - Interview
• 27:28 - Outro

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.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email [email protected], Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

• React 17: https://reactjs.org/blog/2020/10/20/react-v17.html
• React Native docs update: https://reactnative.dev/blog/2020/07/23/docs-update
• ktfmt: https://github.com/facebookincubator/ktfmt

• Intro 0:00
• News 1:00
• Interview 7:28
• Outro 44:44
• Bloopers 52:29

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 usability, performance and memory appetite. The second interview is with Alexander from the Fresco team who talks about the evolution of the open source image loading and memory management library and teases at what’s up next for the widely used project. In the last interview we hear from Lisa (https://twitter.com/lisawrayz), a software engineer on the Messenger Lite team. She joins Pascal to chat about the design principles that went into designing a messenger application for emerging markets.

Sadly, the video recordings of the talks are currently unavailable, but we will update you here and on the podcast as soon as that changes.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email [email protected], Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

News and Topics

• fbjni soft launch: https://github.com/facebookincubator/fbjni
• PyTorch for Android: https://pytorch.org/mobile/android/
• Fresco: https://frescolib.org/
• Reaktive: https://github.com/badoo/Reaktive
• Kotlinx.coroutines: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.coroutines
• Messenger Lite: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.mlite

• Intro 0:05
• News: fbjni 1:43
• News: PyTorch for Android 2:34
• Interviews 3:05
• Correction 3:43
• Sergey on Kotlin Coroutines 4:26
• Alexander on Fresco 11:42
• Lisa on Messenger Lite 26:58
• Outro 35:50
• Nope, no bloopers 36:33

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. Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email [email protected], Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

mvfst-rl: https://github.com/facebookresearch/mvfst-rl The Diff: https://thediffpodcast.com/ Tech & Society with Mark Zuckerberg: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-society-with-mark-zuckerberg/id1460731098

• Intro 0:00
• mvfst-rl 0:40
• The Diff 1:20
• Tech & Society 1:53
• London Mobile Forum 2:19
• Sophie Interview - The Guardian 4:48
• Andrew Interview - BBC 7:17
• Ana Interview - Deliveroo 10:03
• Kateryna Interview - Magic Lab 13:20
• Stefano Interview - Asos 19:33
• Adiba Interview - Moody Month 23:29
• Pasquale Interview - Facebook/Litho 29:43
• Maria Interview - Deliveroo 34:24
• Abdul Interview - Deliveroo 39:36
• Outro 44:57
• Bloopers 47:28

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. As ever, before the interview, Pascal and Rachel discuss some news from the Open Source world, including React Native documentation updates, an exciting contracting opportunity on the Docusaurus project and the latest Facebook Open Source statistics.

Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email [email protected], Twitter (@insidefbmobile) or Instagram (insidefbmobile).

• React Native Docs: https://reactnative.dev/docs/getting-started
• Docusaurus Contract: https://profacebook.applytojob.com/apply/hZPoVr1Eoj/Front-End-Engineer-V
• Open source year 2019 in review: https://engineering.fb.com/open-source/open-source-2019/
• Evolution of WhatsApp within Facebook’s data centers: https://atscaleconference.com/videos/evolution-of-whatsapp-within-facebooks-data-centers/
• WhatsApp on how it’s fighting bulk messaging and fake accounts: https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/06/whatsapp-on-how-its-fighting-bulk-messaging-and-fake-accounts/
• How WhatsApp Reduced Spam for Over 1 Billion People: https://developers.facebook.com/videos/f8-2017/how-whatsapp-reduced-spam-for-over-1-billion-people/

• Intro 0:05
• News: React Native Docs 1:02
• News: Docusaurus Contractor 1:52
• News: Open Source in Review 2019 3:10
• Interview with Silky 5:05
• Sharding Graph Databases 6:10
• Getting into CompSci 7:45
• Scaling an Exabyte Blob Store 9:00
• Benefits of Shared Infrastructure 13:46
• Going from 5 to 6 Nines 17:19
• POPs 18:09
• ISP-Level Caches 19:19
• Making WhatsApp New-Year-Safe 22:13
• Fighting Encrypted Abuse at WhatsApp 25:00
• Encrypted Media Forwarding 32:45
• ML Teams at FB 35:42
• Transition to Management (and Back) 37:37
• Outro 43:56
• Aftershow/Outtakes 48:55
• Harley Quinn: Birds Of Prey 50:59