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 faster. They used a range of low-level hacks while providing high-level abstractions that product teams could safely and productively build on top of. Amy was also the first one to prototype with Catalyst and Meta and has some important tips for you on how not to accidentally wipe your Mac while doing so.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://facebookcareers.com.

Links:

Project LightSpeed: https://engineering.fb.com/2020/03/02/data-infrastructure/messenger/
Mac Catalyst: https://developer.apple.com/mac-catalyst/
Buck: https://buck.build/
Remodel: https://github.com/facebook/remodel - Remodel is a tool that helps iOS and OS X developers avoid repetitive code by generating Objective-C models that support coding, value comparison, and immutability.

Timestamps:

Intro 0:06
Introduction Amy 2:25
Messenger Culture 3:37
Building with Buck 5:38
Catalyst 6:27
Project Lightspeed 17:13
Remodel 23:55
Image Asset Optimisations 28:50
Theming 36:44
What's Next for Amy? 38:21
Outro 39:21
Bloopers 39:54

37: Faster and Smaller Messenger for iOS With Amy