0 → 1, shipping Threads in 5 months

In Jan 2023, we received word that we’d need to build a microblogging service to compete with Twitter in a couple of months. This is the (technical) story of the small team that was assembled to take on that challenge, and that shipped a new social network in July. The app had to scale faster than any other new product over the next week, and I’ll share what we did, and what it was like. Along the way, we took every shortcut in the book to enable the bare minimum product experience we needed, whilst maintaining Instagram’s high bar for craft and simplicity.


Speaker

Zahan Malkani

Software Engineer @Meta

Zahan was trained as a physicist, but fell into making software almost by accident. In his 11 years as a software engineer at Meta, he’s worked on a range of things including the Facebook product, internet.org, dev tools, a hardware product, to Instagram and two generations of Threads apps. He loves the freedom of building something from the ground up, and good (software) design is his passion.

He’s contributed to one of the largest continuous deployment systems in the world (CD for Meta’s backend monolith), the largest Django deployment (Instagram), a widely used Mobile UI framework (React Native), the fastest scaling new app release (Threads), and just to stay grounded: many other projects that went nowhere.

He has a two-year old (whom he adores), so he doesn’t have any free time; but if he did, you’d probably find him on a road bike on one of the beautiful hills in the Bay Area; or curled up with an interesting book: non-fiction, or high fantasy.

Read more

Date

Monday Apr 8 / 11:45AM BST ( 50 minutes )

Location

Fleming (3rd Fl.)

Slides

Slides are not available

Share

From the same track

Session architecture

Beyond Platform Thinking at RB Global – Build Things No One Expects, in a Place No One Expects It

Monday Apr 8 / 10:35AM BST

Ever wondered what is it really like to move from a poorly integrated COTS legacy architecture to a well factored API driven cloud native platform and event driven architecture, globally deployed in AWS EKS with modern observability and daily software releases?

Speaker image - Ranbir Chawla

Ranbir Chawla

SVP of Engineering @RB Global, Previously SME @Thoughtworks Digital Platform Strategy Team, 30+ Years in Software Engineering and Entrepreneurship

Session Data Architecture

Architecting for Data Products

Monday Apr 8 / 01:35PM BST

Data Mesh principles have brought data products to the forefront of data architecture discussions. However, due to the variety of applications and the vast technology landscape, it is hard to bring those principles into practice.

Speaker image - Danilo Sato

Danilo Sato

Global Head of Technology - Data & AI @Thoughtworks, Author of DevOps in Practice, CD4ML, and DataIQ UK’s 100 Most Influential People in Data in 2022–2023

Session

Everything Is a Plugin: How the Backstage Architecture Helps Platform Teams at Spotify and Beyond Spread Ownership and Deliver Value

Monday Apr 8 / 03:55PM BST

Back in 2014, platform engineers at Spotify identified a problem: the number of internal tools was growing rapidly, and as a result engineers around the company were struggling to find the tools and information they needed to work efficiently.

Speaker image - Pia Nilsson

Pia Nilsson

Director of Engineering @Spotify

Speaker image - Mike Lewis

Mike Lewis

Staff Engineer @Spotify

Session platforms

How We Created a High-Scale Notification System at Duolingo That Delivered Millions of Messages Within Seconds During a Super Bowl Commercial Break

Monday Apr 8 / 02:45PM BST

Building a notification system may seem trivial, but what about building one that could reach million of users within a few seconds? What about doing that right after your advertisement airs?

Speaker image - Vitor Pellegrino

Vitor Pellegrino

Site Reliability Engineering @Duolingo

Speaker image - Zhen Zhou

Zhen Zhou

Software Engineer at @Duolingo, Previous Theoretical Computer Science Enthusiast @CMU

Session

Unconference: Architectures You've Always Wondered About

Monday Apr 8 / 05:05PM BST

An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. Attendees come together, bringing their challenges and relying on the experience and know-how of their peers for solutions.