0 → 1, Shipping Threads in 5 Months
InfoQ Homepage Presentations 0 → 1, Shipping Threads in 5 Months
Zahan Malkani shares how they built a microblogging service to compete with Twitter with a small team that shipped a new social network in a few months.
Zahan Malkani 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.
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Malkani: I'm Zahan. I've been an engineer at Meta for over a decade. I'm here to tell you about how we launched the Threads app last year. Let's start by talking about the opportunity that presented itself. It was January last year, and I'd just returned to work after a couple of months on leave. I was looking for something to work on and the tech scene was buzzing about Elon's business decision since he took Twitter private in November. We were talking about it at Meta as well. For reference, back in 2019, Mark had made the call that public conversations were not the focus, and pivoted both Facebook and Instagram to focus on private communication between friends instead. The analogies were the public town square and the living room.
