Meta Tech Podcast

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. For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com. Topics discussed Redex: https://fbredex.com/ Sparta: https://github.com/facebook/redex/tree/master/sparta Proguard: https://www.guardsquare.com/en/products/proguard Facebook Open Source year-in-review: https://code.fb.com/open-source/open-source-2018/ Spectrum: https://github.com/facebookincubator/spectrum Droidcon SF Talk about Spectrum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb5H6_vCEok Mozjpeg: https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg/ PyTorch: https://pytorch.org/ Github 2018 review: https://octoverse.github.com/projects PyTorch 1.0: https://code.fb.com/ai-research/pytorch-developer-ecosystem-expands-1-0-stable-release/   Time Codes Intro 0:00.000 PyTorch 1.0 0:39.728 FB Open Source Year in Review 1:20.000 Spectrum 2:06.708 Retiring Nuclide 2:51.525 Recent Litho Changes 3:38.753 Recent Flipper Changes 5:09.199 Emma Intro 6:49.595 What's Redex? 12:16.341 Optimization Passes 16:02.753 Tradeoffs 27:38.198 Open Source 31:52.276 Pattern Match Optimizations 33:28.602 Contributing to Redex 36:56.130 Removing Cats and Good Bye 38:06.425 Outro 38:25.360 Bloopers 41:44.451  

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. In addition to this, we go through some of our listener questions about team structure, time and release management and pick this up later in our interview where we discuss differences in our overall approach to engineering and QA between Facebook and Instagram. Topics discussed: deepfloat: https://code.fb.com/ai-research/floating-point-math/ Litho: https://fblitho.com/ Flipper Notifications: https://fbflipper.com/docs/writing-a-plugin.html#notifications Profilo: https://facebookincubator.github.io/profilo/ Time stamps: |0:00 |Intro | |0:31 |DeepFloat | |1:15 |Flipper News | |3:50 |Q: Team structures at FB | |4:56 |Q: Time management in teams | |7:06 |Q: FB Release Management | |7:33 |Q: Our views on the structure | |9:10 |Guest Intro: Mona | |9:58 |Mona's Journey from Product to Infra | |13:32 |Switching teams at FB | |15:01 |Performance at IG | |15:24 |Measuring performance | |17:27 |Dealing with regressions | |19:07 |Evolution of scroll perf tracking at IG | |20:03 |Good/bad perf practises | |21:36 |Frameworks helping with perf | |22:48 |Engineering differences between FB and IG | |24:01 |QA at IG | |27:08 |App size growth | |28:47 |Maintaining a high perf bar | |33:51 |What would you do if it wasn't perf? | |34:56 |Puppies and oat milk | |36:59 |Outro | |38:49 |Bloopers |

In this episode, Ariane joins for an in-depth conversation about performance logging. With more than 10 years focusing on this problem, Ariane moved from Facebook Seattle to Facebook London and started a team with other engineers that are as passionate about this subject as she is. You'll hear about why instrumenting performance markers is important for a healthy app, what makes a good metric and how to build sustainable logging systems. If you're just getting started with performance logging, tune in to hear Ariane's advice on how to get started. For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com. Projects discussed: - QNNPack: https://code.fb.com/ml-applications/qnnpack/ - StateService: https://code.fb.com/open-source/stateservice/ - Profilo: https://facebookincubator.github.io/profilo/ - Litho: https://fblitho.com/

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. You'll learn about the challenges her team faced while trying to scale Stories from a prototype and the performance implications of introducing new types of content as well as functionality at the top of News Feed. If you've listened to our previous episode featuring Balazs, who's been an engineering manager for some time, you can now hear about this role from the perspective of someone who's just recently become an engineering manager and is now going through the transition from an Android engineer to a manager. For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com. Projects discussed: - React Native: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/ - Log Device: https://logdevice.io/ - Skip: http://skiplang.com/ - Litho: https://fblitho.com/

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. Balazs talks about some of the projects he's worked on as an Android engineer after he joined Facebook and shares how and why he transitioned to management, starting this new role in the Fresco team. Balazs is now managing a team that is focused on performance and he shares some insights on the unique challenges his team is solving and how he fits in that as an engineering manager. As usual, the episode starts off with a quick discussion on the latest Facebook Open-Source news and upcoming Android talks. For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com. Projects discussed: - Fizz: https://code.fb.com/networking-traffic/deploying-tls-1-3-at-scale-with-fizz-a-performant-open-source-tls-library/ - XAR: https://code.fb.com/data-infrastructure/xars-a-more-efficient-open-source-system-for-self-contained-executables/ - Fresco: http://frescolib.org/ - Profilio: https://code.fb.com/android/profilo-understanding-app-performance-in-the-wild/ - Redex: https://github.com/facebook/redex Talks: - Droidcon: http://uk.droidcon.com/ - Londroid: https://www.meetup.com/android/

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.   For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com.

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. For feedback, please reach out on Twitter at @insidefbmobile or drop us an email at mobilepodcasts@fb.com.

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. Projects discussed: Litho and Sections: https://fblitho.com/ Infer static analyzer: http://fbinfer.com/ Redex: http://fbredex.com/ Multithreaded rendering on Android with Litho and Infer: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1985913448333055/multithreaded-rendering-on-android-with-litho-and-infer/ Please send feedback to mobilepodcasts@fb.com or reach out to Pascal and Emil directly.