Feb 27, 2023

Lisa works on the Dev Craft team at Instagram that embarked on a journey to bring Kotlin to the Instagram for Android code base a little over three years ago. Now, nearly half of the large codebase is migrated and over 80% of newly committed code is in Kotlin. Tune in to hear what the unique challenges of bringing a new language to an existing app are and what it means for build speed, IDE experiences and developer happiness.

Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don’t forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy and https://mastodon.social/@passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/.

Links

• Meta Engineering Blog: How Meta brought AV1 to Reels - https://engineering.fb.com/2023/02/21/video-engineering/av1-codec-facebook-instagram-reels/ 

• Source-only ABIs for Java - https://engineering.fb.com/2017/11/09/android/rethinking-android-app-compilation-with-buck/

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Intro Lisa 1:27

• Dev Craft at Instagram 3:03

• Building DevX Partnerships 3:56

• The History of Kotlin at Instagram 6:22

• Declarative UI 18:29

• Build Speed Challenges 20:25

• Source-Only ABIs 23:19

• IDE Performance 26:19

• Kotlin at IG in 2023 27:15

• Outro 32:02

• Bloopers 33:07