PODCAST · technology
Meta Tech Podcast
by Meta
Brought to you by Meta. In addition to remaining active in the open source community and conference circuit, this podcast offers another channel that allows us to highlight the technical work of our engineers who will discuss everything from low-level frameworks to end-user features. Throughout the podcast, Meta engineer Pascal Hartig (@passy) will interview developers in the company.
Episodes
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88: No Way Out - Engineering Message History Only You Can Read
How do you add end-to-end encryption to a messenger that people have already been using for years, without taking away the message history they expect to be there? Emma Connor works on the team behind Labyrinth, Messenger's encrypted storage protocol. We get into where the encryption keys…
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BONUS: Send Us Your Questions About Engineering at Meta
Pascal is going on Recharge for August so there will be no regular interview episode. However, we want to hear your questions for our mailbag episode. Send them to us on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/metatechpod) or Threads (https://www.threads.com/@metatechpod) or via good old email to...
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87: Everything is Power: Battery Life Engineering for AI Glasses
What changes for you as a developer when the device moves from your pocket to your face? The battery shrinks by an order of magnitude, the thermal budget is whatever won't make your nose uncomfortable, and your mental model of "one process, one device" goes out the window. Rey and Dmitrii talk us...
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86: A Hard Cell: Engineering Ultra-Narrow Batteries for AI Glasses
Your smart glasses run all day on a battery narrower than your pinky finger and building it required reinventing how batteries are made. In this episode, Pascal talks to Karthik and Myuran, the engineers behind Meta's steel can battery technology, to explore why traditional pouch cells couldn't…
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85: Reel Friends: Building Social Discovery that Scales to Billions
You've probably spotted those little circles of your friends' faces popping up on Facebook Reels. They look simple enough, but building them was a proper engineering challenge. In this episode, Pascal chats to Joseph and Subasree about Friend Bubbles, a feature that surfaces which of your close...
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84: Trust But Canary: Configuration Safety at Scale
Have you ever wondered how Meta makes config rollouts safe at scale? In this episode, Pascal sits down with Ishwari and Joe to discuss Meta's approach for propagating changes across services in seconds and discuss why speed increases the need for strong safeguards. Catch the episode to discover...
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83: Patch Me If You Can: AI Codemods for Secure-by-Default Android Apps
At Meta, even seemingly simple engineering tasks—like updating an API—become monumental undertakings when you're dealing with millions of lines of code and thousands of engineers, especially if the changes are security-related. In today's episode, Pascal talks to Alex and Tanu about the…
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82: CSS at Scale with StyleX
It's not just Not Invented Here Syndrome. Some technologies like CSS simply don't scale if you're building some of the largest websites on the planet with thousands of engineers committing to the same code base every day. StyleX is Meta's open-source solution for CSS at scale and allows atomic...
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81: From Zero to Polish: Building Meta Ray-Ban Display
You've likely heard of Meta Ray-Ban Display by now — but what's it actually like to work on it? In this episode, Pascal talks to Kenan and Emanuel about the exciting features of Meta's First-Gen Display Glasses and Neural Wristband, the engineering and product challenges they encountered during...
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80: Lowering emissions with the Open Compute Project
In this episode, Pascal talks to Dharmesh J. (DJ) and Lisa about the vision for the open, scalable future of networking hardware for AI and to break down Meta's big announcements from the 2025 Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit. We dive into the OCP ecosystem, explore how AI is used to enhance our...
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79: Building Android apps in Meta's monorepository with Buck2
How do you keep Android build times under control when your codebase spans tens of thousands of modules and millions of lines of Kotlin? In this episode, Pascal talks with Iveta, Navid, and Joshua from Meta's Android Developer Experience team about the technical strategies that help Meta's...
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78: Generating 3D Worlds with AI
Creating 3D assets can be daunting, but does it have to be? Mahima and Rakesh are on a quest to democratize 3D content creation with AssetGen, a foundation model for 3D. They discuss the challenges of training such a model given the scarcity of available data and how large language models have...
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ARCHIVE: What it's like to write code at Meta
To not leave you without an episode for August, Pascal brings you an episode from the Archive. Back in August 2023 for Episode 55, Pascal spoke with Katherine and returning guest Dustin, two software engineers at Meta about how to ship code at Meta. Why do we have a monorepo? Why and how do we do...
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77: How to build a generic neuromotor interface
Join Pascal as he explores the groundbreaking world of generic neuromotor interfaces with Jesse, Lauren, and Sean. Discover how these technologies enable control of devices with just a flick of the wrist or even a simple intention to move. We'll discuss the role of AI in eliminating the need for...
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76: From C to Rust on Mobile
What happens when decades-old C code, powering billions of daily messages, starts to slow down innovation? In this episode, we talk to Meta engineers Elaine and Buping, who are in the midst of a bold, incremental rewrite of one of our core messaging libraries—in Rust. Neither came into the…
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75: Open-sourcing Pyrefly - A faster Python type checker written in Rust
Pyrefly is a faster, open-source Python type checker written in Rust, succeeding Pyre. But what prompted the rewrite and what besides the language choice ended up making it faster? Host Pascal talks to Maggie, Rebecca and returning guest Neil about the unexpected complexities of building an...
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74: Taking the plunge - The engineering journey of building a Subsea Cable
To ensure that everyone has access to resilient, high-speed and low-latency connections to Meta services, no matter where in the world they are, Meta makes large-scale investments into subsea cable infrastructure. The recently announced Project Water worth will, Once complete, reach five major...
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73: Mobile GraphQL at Meta in 2025
Join Pascal and Sabrina on the latest Meta Tech Podcast episode as they discuss the evolution and future of GraphQL. From client-side consistency to innovative APIs, learn how GraphQL is making developers' lives easier and enhancing user experiences. Discover surprising insights into the…
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72: Multimodal AI for Ray-Ban Meta glasses
In this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast, host Pascal sits down with Shane, a research scientist at Meta, to explore the cutting-edge research behind Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Shane shares insights from his seven-year journey at Meta, where he focuses on computer vision and multimodal AI within the...
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71: Translating Java to Kotlin at Scale
How do you translate roughly ten million lines of Java code to Kotlin? Clicking in your the IDE gets pretty repetitive after a while and doesn't work if you have custom APIs and requirements for null safety. Eve and Jocelyn, two software engineers on the Mobile Infra Codebases Team have taken on...
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70: Jetpack Compose at Meta
Introducing a new Android UI Framework like Jetpack Compose into an existing app is easy right? Import some AARs and code away. But what if your app has specific performance goals to meet, has existing design components, integrations with navigation and logging frameworks? That is where Summer…
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69: To type or not to type — measuring productivity impact with DAT
Do types actually make you more productive or is it just more typing for you to do on the keyboard? That's just one of the questions we managed to answer at least on a small scale with Diff Authoring Time or DAT, here at Meta. Want to know how we leverage metrics to run experiments on…
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68: How to Build a Mixed Reality Headset
How do you build your own mixed reality headset from sketch to scale? That's exactly what Alfred Jones, VP of hardware engineering at Meta Reality Labs, discussed with host Pascal. From choosing the right display technology, battery, thermal budget and of course hitting the right price point. How...
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67: Measuring Developer Productivity with Diff Authoring Time
At Meta, engineers are our biggest asset which is why we have an entire org tasked with making them as productive as possible. But how do you know if your projects for improving developer experience are actually successful? For any other product, you would run an A/B test but that requires…
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66: Inside Bento - Serverless Jupyter Notebooks at Meta
Bento is Meta's internal distribution of Jupyter Notebooks, an open-source web-based computing platform. Host Pascal is joined by Steve who worked with his team on building many features on top of Jupyter, including scheduled notebooks, sharing with colleagues and running notebooks without a…
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65: Getting Ready for Post-Quantum Cryptography
We don't know when but at some point in the future we will face what researchers call a "Quantum Apocalypse". This is when quantum computers will be able to break many of our existing encryption algorithms. To keep Meta'a users safe even from attacks that don't even exist today, Sheran and Rafael...
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64: Caddy - Building the next generation of CAD software for Mixed Reality
After sitting in one too many Zoom meetings looking at flat images of 3D models, mechanical engineers Ed, Jason, Fan, and Raghavan decided that they could do better, taught themselves how to code and started to build Caddy - a CAD app for mixed reality. Tune in to episode 64 to hear their story....
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63: The key to a happy Rust/C++ relationship
Aida was part of one of the first Rust teams here at Meta. One of the biggest challenges was interacting with the large amount of existing C++. With the release of cxx, safe interop between C++ and even async Rust has become a lot easier. Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads...
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62: Building Threads for Web
The basic version of Threads for web was built in just under three months by two engineers, mirroring the nimble engineering practices we talked about on this podcast before when it came to launching Threads for Android and iOS. In this episode, Pascal is joined by Ally and Kevin, two engineers…
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61: Image Quality Improvements at Scale
Every day, trillions of image download requests are made from Meta's family of apps. Zuzanna works on the Media Platform Team that owns the entire flow from serving images from the CDN to displaying the pixels on your phone. One of the project she and her team recently worked on was rolling out…
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60: Simplified Executable Deployment with DotSlash
Distributing binaries and toolchains to developers is a pain but DotSlash makes it a breeze. Instead of committing large, platform-specific executables to your repository, DotSlash combines a fast Rust program with a JSON manifest prefixed with a #! to transparently fetch and execute the binary…
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59: Meta ❤️ Python 3.12
For the second time in just a few months, we are talking Python on the Meta Tech Podcast. Python 3.12 features a whole range of new features, many of which were contributed by Meta. Carl and Itamar join Pascal to talk about their contributions to the latest release, including new hooks that allow...
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58: Advancing GenAI at Meta
For this last episode of 2024, Pascal talks with Devi, an AI research director at Meta. They talk about the history of AI at Meta, some of the basic terms, how Meta's approach to developing and using AI differs notably from other companies and what the future has in store. Got feedback? Send it…
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ARCHIVE: From Facebook Home to Instagram Stories
We're jumping into our time machine and going back to 2018 for an interview with Will B. about the various twists and turns that led to the creation of Instagram Stories. We will be back with a fresh interview next month. Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod),...
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57: Writing and linting Python at scale
Python at Meta is huge. Not only does it famously power Instagram's backend, but it underpins our configuration systems, much of our AI work and many services. Amethyst joins Pascal for this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast to talk about how the Python Foundation Team works to improve the…
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56: How Threads was built in 5 months
Threads went from idea to 100M users in just about five months. This would not have been possible without building on top of Meta's existing systems and infrastructure. Join Pascal as he speaks with Joy, Cameron and Richard, three engineers from the Threads team who worked on backend, iOS and...
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55: What it's like to ship code at Meta
For episode 55, Pascal speaks with Katherine and returning guest Dustin, two software engineers at Meta about how to ship code at Meta. Why do we have a monorepo? Why and how do we do pre-commit code review? What does our CI infrastructure look like? Get the answers to these questions and many…
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54: Building Key Transparency at WhatsApp
In April, WhatsApp announced the launch of a new cryptographic security feature to automatically verify a secured connection based on key transparency. Key transparency helps strengthen the guarantee that end-to-end encryption provides to private, personal messaging applications in a transparent...
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53: Offensive security at Meta's Red Team X
Red Team X is a security team at Meta that is responsible for finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in third-party products that could impact Meta's own security. The team acts as a hybrid between a traditional red team, which focuses on probing their own organisation's systems and products for...
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52: The success story behind PyTorch
PyTorch is now one of the most popular machine learning frameworks out there but that was not a foregone conclusion when it was released in 2016. Our host Pascal is joined by Suraj, a developer advocate here at Meta, to dissect the history of PyTorch and look at the factors that contributed to…
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51: Buck2 - a large-scale build system
For episode 51, Pascal speaks with Neil and Marie, two of the engineers behind Buck2, our open source, large scale build system. Thousands of developers at Meta are already using Buck2 and performing millions of builds per day that on average complete in half the time of Buck1 builds. Marie and...
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50: De-identified authentication at scale
If you hear privacy and your first thought is laborious processes and access management, this interview may be just as mind-expanding for you as it was for our host Pascal. He is joined by Alex and Haozhi who talk about the Anonymous Credential Service (ACS), a highly available multitenant…
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49: Kotlin DevX at Instagram
Lisa works on the Dev Craft team at Instagram that embarked on a journey to bring Kotlin to the Instagram for Android code base a little over three years ago. Now, nearly half of the large codebase is migrated and over 80% of newly committed code is in Kotlin. Tune in to hear what the unique...
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48: A 94% reduction for basic video compute time on Instagram
Ryan and his team found a quick way of reducing the compute resources spent on encoding videos for Instagram by 94%, but that was actually the easy part. Tune in to learn what the fix was and how you roll out changes that can affect the user experience of billions of users. Got feedback? Send it…
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47: Sapling - A scalable, user-friendly source control system
Confused by the syntax of git's rebase command? Overwhelmed with branch management? Check out Meta's new git-compatible source control management system Sapling. Durham and Michael, two of the architects behind the recent open-source release, join Pascal on the podcast to discuss their plans for...
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46: Cross-Platform Video Calling with RSYS
It's the most wonderful time of the year: The time to talk about calling libraries that power most of our audio and video calls across Meta's app. Alice, Ishan and Hani join Pascal to talk about how they replaced the different calling solutions with a library that's extensible by the teams that...
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45: Syncing GitHub to Monorepo with Jon
Back from a short hiatus, Pascal is joined by Jon to talk about the infrastructure that allows commit to sync between Meta's monorepo and GitHub. While ShipIt has been around for a while, allowing commits from the internal repository to sync out to GitHub, Diff Train is its younger brother to…
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BONUS: Comparing Company Cultures with Jay
Ever wondered how the culture of big companies like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon differ? Jay comes with a fairly unique perspective as he has now worked at all three of them. In his discussion with Pascal, he shares his views on the trade-offs that a company value like "Move Fast" brings along and...
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44: Building a Cross-App Messaging Platform
msys is the technology that underpins most of the messaging products Meta offers. What started as a small library in C wrapping sqlite is now used by many teams across the company and is now trying to address the developer experiences challenges that arise from the initial focus on speed and size...
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43: Building for the metaverse with Cami
Cami returns to the Meta Tech Podcast, with now having 18 months of AR/VR experience under her belt. Cami is excited to share what developers can now do on the Quest platform. In this episode, Pascal and Cami discuss new SDKs for motion controls, voice and spatial objects; and for creators…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Brought to you by Meta. In addition to remaining active in the open source community and conference circuit, this podcast offers another channel that allows us to highlight the technical work of our engineers who will discuss everything from low-level frameworks to end-user features. Throughout the podcast, Meta engineer Pascal Hartig (@passy) will interview developers in the company.
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How many episodes does Meta Tech Podcast have?
Meta Tech Podcast currently has 94 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Meta Tech Podcast about?
Brought to you by Meta. In addition to remaining active in the open source community and conference circuit, this podcast offers another channel that allows us to highlight the technical work of our engineers who will discuss everything from low-level frameworks to end-user features. Throughout the...
How often does Meta Tech Podcast release new episodes?
Meta Tech Podcast has 94 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Who hosts Meta Tech Podcast?
Meta Tech Podcast is created and hosted by Meta.
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