The Pragmatic Engineer
Stacked diffs and tooling at Meta with Tomas Reimers
Apr 2, 2025
Tomas Reimers, a former engineer at Meta and co-founder of Graphite, shares fascinating insights into Meta's custom developer tools. Discover why Meta opted for in-house solutions over industry standards like GitHub. He explains the benefits of stacked diffs and monorepos, which have redefined coding practices at Meta. The discussion dives into how AI's rise is reshaping code reviews and testing, emphasizing the need for rigorous oversight. Reimers also touches on Graphite's evolution and why tool integration is crucial for developer productivity.
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Quick takeaways
- Meta’s internal developer tools, like Fabricator and Sandcastle, significantly enhance developer efficiency through seamless integration and workflow management.
- The transition to a monorepo architecture at Meta fosters collaboration, simplifies dependency management, and addresses limitations often found with polyrepos.
Deep dives
Integration of Internal Developer Tools
Meta has developed a suite of internal developer tools that are highly integrated, creating a seamless workflow for its developers. Tools like Fabricator, which focuses on code reviews, are closely tied with other systems including Sandcastle for continuous integration and OnDemand for development environments. This extensive integration allows features such as tracking code changes and automatically notifying developers about deprecations or new syntax, enhancing developer efficiency. The integrated systems also ensure that code submissions are checked for correctness, including essential aspects like internationalization.
