Eventbrite Tech Talk: In Conversation with Facebook's Tom Occhino

[Music] can you tell us a little more about where you started and I came to be in a position you're at you're at today yeah so you know self-identify as a web developer traditionally I went to school for a computer engineering but really what I

spent all of my time doing was like building websites for people my brother-in-law actually got me into building websites I started pretty early on contributing to a couple of open-source JavaScript libraries if anyone in here knows mootools from back in the day any Muto's fans like three of you thank you die hard I started started contributing some open-source JavaScript libraries and from there it kind of like spiraled into you know being involved in the JavaScript community and then I gave a talk at a conference in 2008 that's some

recruiter at Facebook saw and so they kind of reached out and they're like hey this javascript thing we need like people that know how to do that yeah I was like okay so I joined Facebook in January of 2009 and you know initially I just started out building lots of user-facing products and it's like what I was passionate about at the time it's still you know user interfaces user experiences or what I'm passionate about building I made my way into sort of like you know front-end infrastructure and engineering management and stuff out Facebook but I started out building one of the first things I built was

the mentions input on Facebook so at the time a lot of services were introducing the ability to like if you put an @ sign in front of a string they would turn that into a link after they render the thing but on Facebook you know since you know like I know seven you know Paul's or you know Final Four Jess's you know you have to disambiguate on the input side so I built a little interface that would sort of as you're typing show you

a little autocomplete box underneath and then insert a link if I'd rich text thing and I built out at a hackathon we shipped it a few months later that was pretty exciting nice differently yeah and there's no user facing products all the way through I would say for about three or four years and then eventually got into building libraries and frameworks that underpin a lot of our user facing products on web and and then got into engineering management probably at four or five years ago and started with you know managing the react team

which was just Jordan walk as one guy and then it kind of like grew from there and so since then I've been managing all sorts of different projects and infrastructure and technologies yeah so I'd like you to tell me a little bit more about when you first came across react when you first saw Jordans code yeah what was your initial reaction yeah so this is never gonna work so he actually the the thing that he

approached me about it initially was actually not even necessarily about reactive it's just about moving more of Facebook's products to being client-side rendered um we've long been building an app where everything is rendered on the server and the server is the source of truth and then we just send things down to the client the client is very dumb but you have to repeat a lot of work when you do that you have to send a lot of context up to the server to tell it what you have and what you need and we wanted to move especially some of our advertiser interfaces which were very heavy client-side very rich interactive

applications and we wanted to move more of that control of the client so the first thing that he wanted to do is just like hey let's just build like you know client side you know rendering frameworks and things like this we have been experimenting with some client-side MVC stuff especially in our ads create flow we have this framework called bolt very similar to something like an ember and it was great you know it worked really well until it didn't you know it broke down two things contributed to it breaking down just you know increased amount of features and then increased number of engineers kind