Written by Amy Huyen, 2-time intern at Instagram. On my first day of intern orientation last summer, I walked into Facebook wide-eyed and in awe of all the talent that surrounded me. I saw my peers networking with one another, discussing past internship experiences, and using technical jargon that I…

Today we’re excited to announce that Instagram is opening our third full-stack office in San Francisco. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger founded Instagram in San Francisco in 2010, and now — over seven years and 800 million Instagrammers later — we’re thrilled to be back. The Bay Area has incredible…

At Instagram and Facebook, we’ve seen how adopting React Native in product development has allowed our engineers to move and iterate faster on products. Viewing the effects of our changes is now just a single tap of ⌘R away! But working with native code doesn’t provide the same experience…

Instagram recently launched Type Mode, a new way to post creative, dynamic text styles and backgrounds to Stories. …

At Instagram, we have one of the world’s largest deployments of the Apache Cassandra database. We began using Cassandra in 2012 to replace Redis and support product use cases like fraud detection, Feed, and the Direct inbox. At first we ran Cassandra clusters in an AWS environment, but migrated them…

At Instagram, we have the world’s largest deployment of the Django web framework, which is written entirely in Python. We began using Python early on because of its simplicity, but we’ve had to do many hacks over the years to keep it simple as we’ve scaled. Last year we tried…

Today we are excited to announce we’re open-sourcing MonkeyType, our tool for automatically adding type annotations to your Python 3 code via runtime tracing of types seen. Motivation At Instagram we have hundreds of engineers working on well over a million lines of Python 3. Every day we have new engineers…

Instagram employs Python in one of the world’s largest settings, using it to implement the “business logic” needed to serve 800 million monthly active users. We use the reference implementation of Python, known as CPython, as the runtime used to execute our code. As we’ve grown, the number of machines…

Instagram prides itself on having a lean app. But as the number of engineers and features grows, so do the challenges to size. We start to face issues like: increase in application size downloaded from an app store increase in cold start time, and more generally, increased time to interaction…