Rebuilding Facebook Chat

Speaker: Adam Wolff

Facebook chat used to be notoriously unreliable. User complaints about disconnection, incorrect message counts, and missed messages dominated Facebook’s overall product feedback. New code frequently caused regressions because of untracked dependencies in our ginormous, monolithic codebase.

Not long ago, a small team set out to fix this by introducing modularity and unit testing. Along the way, we developed an approach that abandoned conventional MVC in favor of a functional style. The rewrite was a success: we were able to improve every important metric for chat, and we have continued to add features without causing regressions. Come learn about how we did it.