Weekly Tech Notes #13: Threads

🎬 This week’s video dives into Meta’s journey in re-architecting their asynchronous computing platform. Besides splitting the system into smaller pieces to better follow the single-responsibility principle, they also switched from a pull-based to a push-based model. This brought many benefits including less latency caused by errors and better load balancing across regions.

Now let’s dive into some readings. This week is almost all about Meta sources, from their new social app Threads to their asynchronous computing platform. We conclude with a post about capacity planning. Let’s go! 🚀

• Threads: The inside story of Meta’s newest social app – Official post on how Meta built their new social app, Threads.
• Building Meta’s Threads App (Real-World Engineering Challenges) – An exclusive interview with the Threads engineering team by Gergely Orosz.
• Asynchronous computing @Facebook: Driving efficiency and developer productivity at Facebook scale – How Meta evolved their Async architecture over time to cope with the increasing scale of their systems. Among the optimizations, they introduced delay tolerance for messages and capacity regulation like time-shifting (e.g. use of off-peak hours for long or predictive computations).
• Asynchronous computing at Meta: Overview and learnings – This article explains in more detail what has already been described in the previous video.
• Capacity Planning – Diego Ballona explains how to do capacity planning and why it is important.

And that’s all for this week! 👋