Volunteering for a platform rewrite can earn influence

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 18:59

   I'm curious the story behind, you know, where you were at the time and what got you promoted into more of that leadership position? So what was happening was chats and groups that was launched and that was going and there was kind of a team working on this. And I actually had, I'd done a lot of JavaScript before I joined, but at Facebook, I'd never actually written JavaScript because it was all PHP.

2. 19:26

   And so I really just wanted to write JavaScript. And we had this like web interface. And for Facebook groups in particular, a lot of people use web as opposed to mobile, because, for example, for like being a group admin or whatever, it's just easier to do on a big computer with a with a keyboard and stuff. And at the time, the site was really janky. It was like a static site. It was all PHP. There's these little bits of JavaScript that are injected a little bit in different places.

3. 19:51

   There's all sorts of inconsistent state, like all these problems that come out of it. It's just it doesn't feel like a good UX. And so I wanted to rewrite it in JavaScript. And I got a lot of pushback from the org at the time. And I think the big reason was that the info just wasn't really ready for it. Luckily, at the same time, Comet was starting. And Comet was like the rewrite of Facebook.com on desktop.

4. 20:13

   And this was like Tom Machino, who's now at Vercel. This was Ching Chen. There's a bunch of these kind of core people that were working on this. And I just really wanted to be involved. So I reached out and asked how I can help. And I offered Facebook groups as the guinea pig for it. And I didn't ask anyone. I just kind of did it. And then later I kind of went to my leadership in Facebook groups and was like, hey, comments coming.

5. 20:37

   It's going to be a bunch of work where we can get ahead of it, kind of set the standard for everyone, build relationships with these other teams. And I still got a bunch of pushback that was like, hey, you know, you can't put 20 engineers on this. And after a bunch of reviews and kind of haggling for engineers, I think we put, we got like 12 engineers or something like that. Because it was a pretty big migration.

6. 20:56

   You know, it's going to take like a year. groups is the single biggest product service in all facebook which is actually kind of surprising um yeah and the the migration kind of worked and and i think something else pretty fun about it besides just like building relationships and friendships with this infra team i never would have worked with otherwise which was in itself so rewarding and so fun um i think a lot of it was we got to influence the direction of comet and it's kind of weird because for an infra project a product team often cannot influence the direction they're more seen as a customer of it but what happened here was because we helped co-build it we built a lot of the abstractions that were then used by other teams that were also building on comet and you know for example a particular one i remember was like relay mutations so like you send api requests and you need some

7. 21:44

   sort of consistency but there's actually this bug where like let's say there's like a button and you press the button, every time you press it, you send a post request. And every time you press the button, it toggles the state of that button. For a really nice UX, what you want is as soon as you press the button, the state should toggle, which means you need an optimistic update. But also, when the network request comes back, you need to also update the local cache to make sure it's consistent. And if you're just like mashing that button, what can happen is that the responses come in out of order, and you might end up with a different state than what was in the UI.

8. 22:16

   And so I wrote a system to kind of queue up mutations. So it was like consistency at the cost of reliability. And this was kind of the right trade-off at the time. And everyone ended up using this. And this is how I met like Joe Savona and a bunch of the relay team that was working on the data stores. And it was just really fun. And this is something that since then and before then, and whenever I work with engineers, I just love when people go a layer deeper and just try to figure out like what's going on.

9. 22:44

   And like, just because you're a product engineer, doesn't mean you can't build infra just because you're an infra engineer doesn't mean you can't go talk to users like just be curious about these other parts of the stack definitely and in your agency and getting ahead of comment or this big javascript rewrite you mentioned in your in your writing that you know getting ahead of that actually gave you a lot more control and also dibs on opportunities so when you talk about opportunities there is is this what you're kind talking about like building these fundamental pieces of prod infra that are impactful for everyone that's going to take on the new platform yeah yeah that's an example of it um and then maybe you know like a different kind of example is comet was a lot higher quality than the thing

10. 23:27

    that came before because you know it's like a single page web app um so it can just feel a lot more polished but we hadn't yet figured out like what exactly quality means on the product side and so i wrote a bunch of notes trying to define that and then did a bunch of tech talks trying to just like teach people on other teams like here's what we learned about quality um and just kind of