TOPIC: Mobile, Video and Web

Mobile @Scale 2023

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Mobile @Scale is a technical conference designed for the engineers, product managers, and engineering leaders building mobile experiences at significant scale (millions to billions of daily users).

Mobile has emerged as the primary means of interacting with products, making it an essential and unique medium in today’s digital landscape. However, developing for mobile comes with its own set of challenges. The ecosystems are not as open as the web or backend, requiring deep understanding of mobile-specific skills and languages. The diversity of devices, network connections, and operating systems adds complexity to development, making it crucial to find effective solutions that work across this wide range of variables. Doing all this at scale adds in yet another layer of complexity, what works well for a majority of the apps and developers often falls over when you start drastically increasing the number of engineers working on a product and the number of people using the end result.

Mobile @Scale provides a rare opportunity to gather and connect the best and brightest minds in the mobile industry. Join us as we bring together industry leaders, innovative thinkers, and top-notch experts to delve into the challenges and advancements of building for mobile at scale.

Register today and check back for upcoming speaker and agenda announcements!

AGENDA SPEAKERS

ABOUT EVENT

Mobile @Scale 2023 proudly presents a glimpse into the future of mobile innovation, anchored by a captivating keynote address by industry visionary, Mohsen Agsen. With an impressive career spanning over 30 years, Agsen’s legacy includes his role as a former Microsoft Technical Fellow, coupled with an impressive portfolio of numerous patents. With a distinguished journey spanning over seven years at Meta, he has orchestrated transformative leaps in messaging and generative AI landscapes such as Project Lightspeed, the rejuvenation of Facebook’s Messenger’s iOS app that boasts twice the speed on launch and one-fourth the storage space while maintaining all of its beloved features due to a complete rewrite of the codebase. Agsen’s keynote promises a deep dive into the domain of generative AI products at Meta, while exploring its intersection with mobile app development.

Beyond this exciting keynote, this event will feature discussions on major open source projects, mobile architecture trends, experimentation, and the intricate challenges that impact the developer experience. Join us for this virtual event taking place on October 25, 2023!

EVENT AGENDA

Event times below are displayed in PT.

October 25

09:00 AM - 09:10 AM
Opening Remarks
Speaker Prashant Ratanchandani,Meta
09:10 AM - 09:25 AM
Keynote: Generative AI in Mobile Applications

Generative AI is poised to be one of the most profound transformations in technology with a tremendous impact on society. In this talk we will provide a background on generative AI and discuss the intersection between generative AI technologies and mobile application development.

Speaker Mohsen Agsen,Meta
09:25 AM - 09:45 AM
Messaging @ Scale

Join us as we explore the captivating journey involved in crafting a dynamic mobile messaging platform. Delving into the realm of platform design models, we will discuss their strengths and limitations. Gain insight into how Meta’s mobile Messaging System, Msys, was shaped by these considerations and how Msys scales to new clients as well as to other apps.

Speaker Akshay Patel,Meta
09:45 AM - 10:05 AM
Improving Instagram iOS Build Speeds

To develop effectively, mobile product engineers must be able to quickly see the results of their code changes. By late 2020, after years of codebase and complexity growth in Instagram's iOS app, our build times had slowly regressed to the point where engineers needed to wait multiple minutes for each build. Over the past two years, we've restructured our codebase and optimized our build times, allowing our builds to complete in a sixth of the time.

Speaker Nate Stedman,Meta
10:05 AM - 10:25 AM
Kotlin @ Instagram

Learn about the history of Kotlin adoption at Instagram: from shipping Buck support in 2019 to introducing the new Kotlin compiler from Jetbrains in 2023. Instagram has shifted an incredibly large codebase from Java to mostly Kotlin (Instagram surpassed 50% lines of code in Kotlin in early 2023). This presentation will cover some of the technical challenges and cultural challenges of moving a complex codebase from one language to another. We will cover Kosabi, a Meta-built source-only-ABI generation tool to improve Kotlin incremental build speeds. We will also touch on how Kotlin enables the future of UI development by enabling Jetpack Compose.

Speaker Lisa Watkins,Meta
10:25 AM - 10:40 AM
Break
10:40 AM - 11:00 AM
Making Threads for iOS

Meta's Threads app launch shattered records, exceeding even CEO Mark Zuckerberg's expectations. With an unprecedented influx of users—achieving one million within an hour and surpassing 100 million in less than 5 days—the scale of this achievement raises questions. How does one orchestrate such a colossal launch? What does the timeline look like? What hurdles emerge, and how are they navigated? Join us for an insightful discussion that unveils the inception and remarkable journey behind launching the Threads app. Discover the strategies, challenges, and pivotal moments that contributed to this groundbreaking success. From conception to rapid adoption, gain valuable insights into the mechanics of launching an app of unprecedented proportions.

Speaker Cameron Roth,Meta
11:00 AM - 11:20 AM
Making Threads for Android

How we built Threads for Android in 5 months and reached 50 million people, while adopting Jetpack Compose for the first time for an entire app, and some learnings along the way.

Speaker Richard Zadorozny,Meta
11:20 AM - 12:00 PM
React Native Panel with Live Q&A
12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Lunch Break
01:00 PM - 01:20 PM
Mobile Experimentation at Instacart

Experimentation is key to shipping products today. On mobile devices, connectivity, latency, and coordination can make it challenging to keep a smooth and consistent user experience. In this talk you'll learn how Instacart built a mobile A/B system that scales to millions of devices, the challenges faced, and how a sprinkling of computer science fundamentals helped solve them.

Speaker Ben Bader,Meta
01:20 PM - 01:40 PM
Design Systems @ Scale

Curious to learn more about Meta's work on UI Design Systems? Tune in to learn about the tooling and infrastructure we are building at Meta and go deeper into how we are utilizing common building blocks which are shared across multiple design systems and apps in order to scale!

Speaker Aaron Coplan,Meta
01:40 PM - 01:45 PM
Closing Remarks
Speaker Parisa Zare,Meta

SPEAKERS AND MODERATORS

Prashant Ratanchandani is the VP of Engineering for FOA Foundation, where he supports the... read more

Prashant Ratanchandani

Meta

Technical and business leader with over 30+ years of industry experience. At Microsoft on... read more

Mohsen Agsen

Meta

Akshay Patel is a software engineer with over 5 years of experience at Meta.... read more

Akshay Patel

Meta

Nate has worked on mobile infrastructure for Instagram for six years, maintaining our core... read more

Nate Stedman

Meta

I build Android Infrastructure for Instagram. read more

Lisa Watkins

Meta

Cameron is a seasoned software engineer with over 6 years at Meta and over... read more

Cameron Roth

Meta

10 years at Meta with a focus on building delightful user experiences, especially in... read more

Richard Zadorozny

Meta

Ben is a senior staff software engineer at Instacart with over a decade of... read more

Ben Bader

Meta

Aaron is a Software Engineer at Meta, where he works on tooling and infrastructure... read more

Aaron Coplan

Meta

Parisa Zare is a Technical Product Manager supporting the Facebook App Product Architecture organization.... read more

Parisa Zare

Meta

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