In order to streamline our internal blog operations, all future Instagram Engineering content will be posted on the Engineering at Meta blog located here. This will allow us to post more regularly about the novel engineering work being done at Instagram. To stay connected for future content, you can follow our socials here: Engineering @ Meta Twitter Engineering @ Meta Facebook Page The Instagram Engineering Blog has a new location was originally published in Instagram Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to th ..read more

Introduction Recommended content, which is surfaced in places like Explore or hashtags, is a central part of people’s experience on Instagram. As people browse this “unconnected content” from accounts that they aren’t already linked to on Instagram, it’s extremely important to identify and deal with content that violates our Community Guidelines or might be considered offensive or inappropriate by the viewer. Last year, we formed a team dedicated to finding and taking action on both violating and potentially offensive content on these unconnected surfaces of Instagram, as part of our ongoing e ..read more

We recently shipped Data Saver Mode, a new feature on Instagram for Android that helps the app consume less mobile data. In this post, we’ll go over why we decided to work on this feature, our approach in developing it, the engineering implementation, and how people were impacted by it. Motivation The motivation behind building Data Saver Mode was threefold: First, research suggested many people felt constrained while using Instagram because it consumed a big percentage of their data. We ran a survey in a few different countries (United States, Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Fr ..read more

This post was originally published on the Facebook AI blog. Over half of the Instagram community visits Instagram Explore every month to discover new photos, videos, and Stories relevant to their interests. Recommending the most relevant content out of billions of options in real time at scale introduces multiple machine learning (ML) challenges that require novel engineering solutions. We tackled these challenges by creating a series of custom query languages, lightweight modeling techniques, and tools enabling high-velocity experimentation. These systems support the scale of Explore whi ..read more

Shupin Mao is a senior software engineer at Facebook. During her last four years at the company, Shupin helped several teams and gained experience across Instagram and Facebook, including the Instagram Well-being team. Here she shares what got her into engineering, favorite moments, lessons learned, and more. How did you become an engineer? When working on course projects during my undergrad and grad study, I felt the passion for solving coding problems, which was the main motivation to apply for an engineering position after graduation. After joining Facebook, I was still motivated to s ..read more

In recent years instagram.com has seen a lot of changes — we’ve launched stories, filters, creation tools, notifications, and direct messaging as well as a myriad of other features and enhancements. However, as the product grew, a side effect was that our web performance began to slow. Over the last year we made a conscious effort to improve this. This ongoing effort has thus far resulted in almost 50% cumulative improvement to our feed page load time. This series of blog posts will outline some of the work we’ve done that led to these improvements. In part 1 we talked about prefetching data ..read more

Welcome to the third post in our series on Python at scale at Instagram! As we mentioned in the first post in the series, Instagram Server is a several-million-line Python monolith, and it moves quickly: hundreds of commits each day, deployed to production every few minutes. We’ve run into a few pain points working with Python at that scale and speed. This article takes a look at a few that we imagine might impact others as well. Consider this innocuous-looking sample module: import re from mywebframework import db, route VALID_NAME_RE = re.compile("^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$") @route ..read more

Making Instagram.com faster: Part 3 — cache first In recent years instagram.com has seen a lot of changes — we’ve launched stories, filters, creation tools, notifications, and direct messaging as well as a myriad of other features and enhancements. However, as the product grew, a side effect was that our web performance began to slow. Over the last year we made a conscious effort to improve this. This ongoing effort has thus far resulted in almost 50% cumulative improvement to our feed page load time. This series of blog posts will outline some of the work we’ve done that led to these imp ..read more

One of the most exciting announcements at WWDC this year was the introduction of platform-wide dark mode in iOS 13. During WWDC a group of enthusiastic iOS engineers and designers from Instagram’s design systems team banded together to begin plotting out what it would take to adopt dark mode in our app. This week’s update to Instagram includes full support for iOS dark mode. This took months of work and collaboration between numerous design and engineering teams in the company. As such, we wanted to take some time to share how we approached adopting dark mode and some of the obstacles we enco ..read more

Tamar is the Head of Analytics at Instagram. She supports a team of data scientists and data engineers responsible for analytics, data science, and experimentation. Tamar also leads the Diversity and Inclusion task force at Instagram. She is a passionate advocate for women in tech and has served as a mentor for Minds Matter and Women Unlimited, as a speaker for Girls Who Code, and as co-chair of the Analytics Collective. Tamar Shapiro, Instagram’s Head of Analytics This interview was conducted by Serena, an Instagram engineering manager. How did you become an engineer? When I was in college, t ..read more