I started off as an iOS engineer at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. I was in this role for over 4 years and recently moved into a new role as a Mobile User Interface Engineer in our New York office. In this new role, I work on tooling for designers. Developers have a whole suite of tools to do their jobs, but design has been an evolution. Photoshop for a long time was the tool of choice, but Sketch is now used by the majority in Facebook and by many designers around the world, and new tools are being released very frequently. It’s fun to be using my Mac OS X Cocoa skills again!

I'm most proud of the work I did on the Facebook Interface Guidelines (FIG), which are specifications and implementations of shared user interface components for our major platforms. I led the iOS side of the effort and worked cross functionally with various PMs, engineers and designers across many different product teams. I really wanted to raise the quality of UI code and its appearance, and approached that by building shared infrastructure. The project had a slow start before I took it on, and over two years we saw a steady increase in the adoption of the components we had built and therefore an overall increase in code quality and consistency across the app. I'm really driven by passion of how I think things should be architected and built. I always got a kick out of owning the underlying UI infrastructure that drove so many surfaces across the app. FIG has gathered even more steam recently, and Design Tools is a fresh way of attacking the same problem from a different angle.

I started working at a small company in Amsterdam that had won an Apple design award. Soon after joining them, Facebook acquired the company, and then relocated to the Bay Area to join Facebook. I had been to San Francisco many times for the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), but didn't know much about Silicon Valley. I've always worked in smaller companies and hadn't fathomed working for a larger company. Having come to Facebook in Menlo Park and now in our New York office, I sometimes wonder where my career would be had I discovered the opportunities here sooner.

The move itself was very streamlined due to the relocation services provided by Facebook, but there were some challenges too. Do a lot of browsing online to get a good feel for the market, start looking for housing early. Moving to San Francisco was not something I had considered and looking back, it was definitely the right decision. I've grown my career, and with the experience and knowledge I've gained working at Facebook, I am confident in my ability to tackle any new technical challenges.

I was working on a project to update the navigation menu for mobile, replacing the hamburger menu with a tab bar. Although to a savvy user or developer this looks like a fairly straightforward change, it took a long time to do because people can be greatly affected by even the smallest change in their app. In order to make the necessary changes, we had to invent a native mobile A/B testing framework. This was a completely new challenge, and I worked with a whole new set of server engineers to get the job done and learned a lot of new things. The framework enabled us to ship the hamburger to small segments of the public so we could assess how it compared to the existing app before we shipped it to 100%. I worked on this together with one other engineer. Being able to impact so many people's daily experience around the world with such a small team is really great and something I continue to experience at Facebook.

It has always been a very natural flow from project to project, I've had the autonomy to select projects and work in different areas. While in bootcamp I fixed a few bugs on the photo viewer in the shipping hybrid app, this lead to working on the camera app in Facebook. Following that I worked on the photo viewing experience in the Facebook app which was being rebuilt natively; launching that to the world was pretty exciting. I then moved from pure product to product infrastructure, and we formed an iOS core team. I was then asked to work on the hamburger menu project, which was a move slightly back to product again, with infra pieces. I've always shifted slightly in and out of product and product infrastructure. It’s a good and healthy way to understand what it takes to ship at Facebook.

Move Fast, because we try to peg short term goals to larger infrastructure projects, which means we are adding value in the short term while also betting on longer term and loftier goals. We're building software to allow different design tools to talk to one another so that designers can move more freely amongst tools without being locked into just one. We move fast to test our assumptions and to prove theories, to make sure our anticipated change will have positive impact. And at the same time we are building key infrastructure in the form of reusable frameworks so that later down the road we can build more complex things on top of.

I would name it after a bug I introduced. When I was in bootcamp, I was writing php and using git for the first time in my life. The diff I wrote was pushed into production and caused a bug in mobile signups. Turns out I had left the "i" out of mobile... so I would have to name the conference room "Moble".