Episode 15 features a topic that might sound familiar to you if you've listened to previous editions of Inside Facebook Mobile. It's a project that provides such value to developers that it keeps coming up in discussions with engineers working in many different areas at Facebook. 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 programmin...
Jul 17, 2019•44 min•Ep. 15
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. Before you hear all about this, Dani...
Jun 14, 2019•43 min•Ep. 14
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. Please do send us feedback! You can reach us via email [email protected] , Twitter ( @in...
May 17, 2019•40 min•Ep. 13
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. If you enjoy the business aspect of a project and you're someone who can coordinate understanding a problem and identifying a path to the solution, being a Product Manager will fit you lik...
Apr 18, 2019•34 min•Ep. 12
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. If you've never given much attention to the network protocols your app is using, listen to Subodh why you should give it a second though. You'll hear about how the Android networking stack has evolved over the years, why zero round-trip time matters on mobile and what it's like to contribute to a network protocol specification (spoiler: it's TLS 1.3...
Mar 15, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 11
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 interestin...
Feb 19, 2019•34 min•Ep. 10
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...
Jan 17, 2019•42 min•Ep. 9
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 ov...
Dec 13, 2018•39 min•Ep. 8
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, t...
Nov 16, 2018•44 min•Ep. 7
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 manag...
Oct 17, 2018•44 min•Ep. 6
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 s...
Sep 18, 2018•53 min•Ep. 5
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 int...
Aug 22, 2018•40 min•Ep. 4
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 [email protected]...
Jun 28, 2018•38 min•Ep. 3
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.
Jun 14, 2018•17 min
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.
Jun 05, 2018•46 min•Ep. 2
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 [email protected] or reac...
Apr 16, 2018•34 min•Ep. 1
Emil and Pascal introduce themselves and tell you about what they've planned for their new podcast. Please send feedback to [email protected] or reach out to Pascal and Emil directly.
Apr 11, 2018•5 min