My Experience at Facebook F8

4 min readApr 14, 2016

It is with great drive and energy that I compose this somewhere in a cafe which I’ve never been along the Van Ness Street in San Francisco , 8 blocks away from Fort Mason center where the 2016 edition of Facebook F8 took place.

Coming over to SF/SV, I have always wanted to meet with people from this part of this world, get to experience how their thought-processes are, how they view the world and how they have successfully built and still build products with truly global experience.

I will go through what I learnt from the 2 days of immersive experience in F8.

Day 1

It was humbling to see Mark in person but sadly couldn’t click a selfie with him :( just maybe I may be a trending Facebook celeb.

Mark gave the opening keynote address and gave a 10 year roadmap for Facebook. Listening to him reminded me of Boss Fowe and his vision of iQube Labs coupled with how open he is towards sharing with iQubers.

Few of the things highlighted(minus technologies) were :

Build systems that are better than people with perception.
83% of FB users are outside the US
70% of developers are outside the US
55 of the 7,000 languages in the world are supported online.

This gives insight into the kind of problems they want to solve and the scale at which they think about solving them, truly GLOBAL!

Technology Evolution

We have moved from Conversational to Web and finally Apps (Conversational->Web->Apps)

Challenges in building global product

Connectivity
Availability
Accessibility

Long term goals

Connecting the world to the internet
Artificial Intelligence
Virtual/Augmented Reality

Major issues in success of app development

Get people signed up
Get people engaged
Get and understand what keeps them coming back

The challenges to tackle in getting to 4 billion

Availability (1billion)
Affordability (1 billion)
Awareness (2 billion)

Solving any of the above problems gives additional 1+billion people connected.

There was the “Happy Hour” break where I got to meet with people from Buffer, CityMapper and a couple of other guys. We discussed the challenges facing Nigeria in which I pointed out that facilities and exposure are majorly critical to building a strong and vibrant tech community in Nigeria.

They shared their challenges too and the C.T.O of a company which operates similar to iQube Labs (Buffer) with its remote working model shared the challenges they face in operating efficiently and I got solid advice from ex-Googlers amongst other people on the power of leveraging.

The era of “Local Champion” is dead.

And YES, we had an after party with blasting music for the next 2:30hrs and who says tech people don’t catch fun too :).

To cap the day, all attendees were given a Samsung galaxy S6 and a Samsung gear to roll with it.

Day 2

Started with keynote addresses from engineering managers, software engineers, product managers and they talked about

Open Compute engine
Telecom Infra Project
makeitopen.com (Open source React F8 app)
LiveMap

As it is said that data clears all doubts, interesting statistics (handled by their custom infrastructure) were shared which showed real engineering being done:

1Billion+ stories everyday
6 million predictions per second

Machine Learning (Vincent Cheung)

LiveMap
“ an elaborate code that is written nowhere, known to no one and understood by all ” — Sapi (1949) ← A good example is “shrugging”, shrugging can be decoded in various ways and at each usage, anybody can understand the message being passed across. This is hard for machines to get.

The above is a major challenge for engineers building truly intelligent systems because humans make some gestures which are universally known but we can’t explain how we decode them.