Alex Balazs is the Intuit Chief Architect and has been working at the company for almost twenty years. Intuit’s products include QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Mint. These applications are used to file taxes, manage business invoices, conduct personal accounting, and other critical aspects of a user’s financial life. Because the applications are managing money for users,

Africa is rapidly adopting the same software and hardware technologies that have transformed the western world over the last few decades. But access to computers and technology education is still uneven. Where there is access to computers, smartphone adoption often comes before access to laptops or desktop computers. Nelly Cheboi is the founder of TechLit

Facebook’s strategy is shaped by long term goals, short term requirements, and the available resources of the company. Long term goals are necessary for thinking through big decisions such as acquisitions, hardware product investments, and open source software ecosystems. To implement long term goals, Facebook needs to communicate the vision of the company and foster

React is a set of open source tools for building user interfaces. React was open sourced by Facebook, and includes libraries for creating interfaces on the web (ReactJS) and on mobile devices (React Native). React was released during a time when there was not a dominant frontend JavaScript library. Backbone, Angular, and other JavaScript frameworks

Facebook engineering is designed to self-assemble. When an engineer joins Facebook, the engineer goes through boot camp, where they are exposed to multiple projects to find a good fit in terms of technical skills and personal preferences. Since there are so many different initiatives within the company at any given moment, a new hire can

When Facebook was scaling in its early years, the company developed engineering practices that were unlike any other organization before it. Early Facebook engineering developed unusual practices because the problem set was unusual. Facebook was a highly detailed, highly interactive, multi-user web application. Facebook was pushing the limits of PHP and JavaScript in a time

Facebook engineering is commonly described by two words: move fast. Building products quickly has been a differentiating characteristic of the company since its inception. From the longtime engineers to the summer interns, Facebook instills a sense of immediacy and opportunity in all of its employees. The goal of Facebook is to make the world more

Software engineering is harder than it should be. There are many people who have an app idea that they are not sure how to build. Some of these people are highly technical professionals like real estate agents, scientists, and accountants. These professionals learn to use spreadsheets in their day-to-day work. Spreadsheets are also used widely

Relational data systems have evolved from single node instances to complex distributed systems. Almost any database can be accessed through a SQL statement, but the guarantees of these databases can vary in terms of consistency, availability, latency, durability, and financial cost. Relational database systems that explore these different sets of tradeoffs are sometimes categorized as

WebAssembly is a binary instruction format for applications to run in a memory-constrained, stack-based virtual machine. The WebAssembly ecosystem consists of tools and projects that allow programs in a variety of languages to compile into WebAssembly and run in a safe, fast, sandboxed runtime environment. WebAssembly is a transformative technology for the Internet. Most users