Facebook Open Source Management with Tom Occhino

Greatest Hits – Software Engineering Daily

Facebook has released open source software projects that have changed the industry. The most impactful projects to date are the React frontend user interface tools: ReactJS and React Native.

Before React became popular, there were multiple competing solutions for the dominant frontend JavaScript framework. React became the most prominent because of its invention of JSX, its one-way data flow, and the strength of its community.

The React community is led by Facebook engineers. Facebook has a full-time team dedicated to improving React. Facebook also has the benefit of seeing the hardest problems in web development ahead of the rest of the industry, since Facebook is always pushing the leading edge of what software can do.

As React evolves, Facebook itself is the first user of updates to the libraries. Engineers on the React team will proactively update the applications on other teams with new React code. In this way, Facebook’s React team is similar to a platform engineering team, except the open source community benefits from the improvements as well.

Tom Occhino is an engineering director at Facebook. He joins the show to discuss his ten years of experience at the company and his role today as a senior leader in charge of open source developers.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• New SEDaily app for iOS and for Android. It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. I’ll be commenting on each episode, so if you hear an episode that you have some commentary on, jump onto the app, or on SoftwareDaily.com to share your thoughts. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe. Altalogy is the company who has been developing much of the software for the newest app, and if you are looking for a company to help you with your mobile and web development, I recommend checking them out.
• FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. FindCollabs is the company I am building, and we are having an online hackathon with $2500 in prizes. If you are working on a project, or you are looking for other programmers to build a project or start a company with, check out FindCollabs. I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast, so if you want to learn more about the community you can hear that podcast.
• Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC, Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco.
• We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to [e-mail] with “Internship” in the subject line.

The post Facebook Open Source Management with Tom Occhino appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.