What does engineering at Meta actually look like from the inside? Spoiler: almost nothing you know from outside applies.

In this episode, Dan sits down with Evyatar Alush, Software Engineer at Meta in Tel Aviv and the creator of EmojiPicker React (600K+ weekly downloads) and Vest. Evyatar's journey is one of the most unusual on the show: no degree, no high school diploma, learned JavaScript on Code Academy during military night shifts in a server room, then talked his way into Fiverr, scaled to Front End Platform Lead, and got recruited into Facebook in 2019.

We get into what it's actually like inside Meta's frontend infrastructure: Hack instead of PHP, Flow instead of TypeScript, Relay instead of Apollo, Sapling instead of Git, stacked diffs instead of pull requests, and a custom everything (testing frameworks, ORMs, dev servers, data centers). We also cover his open source philosophy, why he builds his own libraries instead of pulling dependencies, the supply chain risks of modern npm, and how AI-assisted code is reshaping open source maintainer work.

Key Topics:

- Learning to code on military night shifts with zero CS background

- Joining Fiverr with one year of experience and bluffing through the interview

- Building Fiverr's notification system, in-app inbox, and toast library

- Creating EmojiPicker React from a Fiverr internal tool

- The "Unmask" manifesto and starting Fiverr's frontend infrastructure team

- Designing the Front Ants team by faking the trappings of a real team

- Building micro-frontends that bridge a Ruby on Rails monolith and React

- Saying no to Facebook on the first email

- Interviewing at Meta in London (and the Dan Abramov interview)

- The Calibra/Diem crypto wallet team during COVID

- Hack vs PHP, Flow vs TypeScript, Relay vs Apollo, Sapling vs Git

- Stacked diffs and why ex-Meta engineers miss them

- Why "move fast and break things" is dead at Meta

- Code review, dev mod servers, and end-to-end testing at scale

- Open source maintenance in the AI era and Cursor-generated PRs

- Why he owns the "context" package on npm

GUEST: Evyatar Alush

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evyataralush-5b760866

🐙 GitHub: https://github.com/ealush

🌐 EmojiPicker React: https://github.com/ealush/emoji-picker-react

🌐 Vest: https://vestjs.dev

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💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

- EmojiPicker React: https://www.npmjs.com/package/emoji-picker-react

- Vest (form validation): https://vestjs.dev

- Sapling (Meta's source control): https://sapling-scm.com

- The Hack language: https://hacklang.org

- Flow: https://flow.org

- Relay: https://relay.dev

- The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

- Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

#Meta #Facebook #Frontend #ReactJS #HackLang #Flow #Relay #Sapling #StackedDiffs #OpenSource #EmojiPickerReact #Vest #SoftwareEngineering #SenorsAtScale

💬 What's your take on Meta's "everything in-house" engineering culture? Would you rather work with familiar tools or relearn engineering from scratch for better internal infrastructure?