Less than three years ago, engineers from Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Pinterest, and Facebook — including two from the then brand-new Facebook London office — met at Mobile @Scale in Menlo Park to talk about the challenges of building mobile software at large scale. Last Wednesday, the first Mobile @Scale London showed how far mobile development at scale has come in only a few short years.
In 2013, a lot of the conversation was about how to adapt approaches to testing, optimising, developing, and deploying software that had worked well on the web to the new mobile platforms.
Fast-forward to 2016 — you can imagine a musical montage showing lots of hacking — and instead of the conversation being about adapting to new mobile platforms, it is now about improving mobile platforms themselves.
The nature of the conversation has also changed. In 2013, the takeaways were lessons learned. In 2016, they are tools, frameworks, and platforms that can be downloaded, installed, forked, built upon, and deployed.
Mobile @Scale London was about crossing boundaries, improving platforms, and sharing code between organisations, but as Henna Kermani highlighted in her talk about using Facebook’s open source Fresco library at Twitter, each of those collaborations started with a conversation between engineers.
After a day of listening to conversations between 300 of the smartest mobile developers, I’m excited to see what the next three years holds.
Videos of the Mobile @Scale London talks are posted below. If you are interested in joining the next event, please check out and follow the @Scale Facebook page.
