Simon Stewart, Facebook: “One billion people can see the code you change”

Newsroom 12/12/2013 | 06:07

Simon Stewart is a software engineer at Facebook, also being the creator of WebDriver and a core team member at Selenium. Business Review talked to Stewart to find out how he was recruited and what a career at Facebook looks like. He is based in the London office and is mainly working on end-to-end testing tools and infrastructure, with a focus on Android.He was a speaker at the How to Web regional technology event. 

By Otilia Haraga

First of all, how did you come to work at Facebook? How were you recruited?

A friend of mine joined Facebook a few years before I did. He kept telling me how much fun he was having, and he seemed pretty happy there. Over the years, more and more of the people that I liked to work with and respected either interviewed there or joined; it’s always nice to work in a place with people who you know are great.

When I was told that Facebook was opening an engineering office in London, I happened to be at a point in my career when I was trying to decide what to do next. I felt that it made sense for me to interview there, if only to get a feel for my options. In the end, the people that I met, the scale of the work that they offered- 1 billion people can see the code you change!- and the size of the company were all very appealing. My final set of interviews was with an amazing group of people, including Kent Beck and Jason Evans, two engineers I have a lot of respect for and knew by reputation. It was challenging, but I found it to be a lot of fun.

 

What exactly do you do there? What kind of projects are you working on?

I’m part of the internal tools team in the London office. My focus is on developer efficiency and effectiveness, particularly on mobile. My main project is to work on our end-to-end testing tools and infrastructure, and I’m focusing on Android most of the time. I’m also a contributor to our build tool, Buck, which is used by all our Android engineers.

One of the common misconceptions about Facebook is that we only work in PHP. Most of my day-to-day work is actually done in Java and IntelliJ, a combination that I’m really familiar and comfortable with.

 

What is different about working for Facebook compared with the other companies you have worked for?

I’ve been fortunate enough to work for several companies that are engineering led, and Facebook is the same. One of the sayings here is that “code wins arguments”, and I love the speed at which we take an idea, code it up and then gather data to help determine whether a change is beneficial to people. That’s easy on the web, since we push a new version of the site twice a day, and it’s been really interesting for me to see how we’ve been attempting to get something similarly flexible for Android. So, the speed at which we move is one of the big differences.

I’m the lead of the Selenium project and the creator of WebDriver, so Open Source is something I care passionately about, and Facebook also cares. I’ve really enjoyed watching us release so much of our code as OSS, and I’m even more pleased to see contributions and pull requests from the community be accepted into those projects.

The two projects I’m following most closely on there are Buck (the Android-built tool that I work on sometimes), and xctool, which aims to make builds on iOS as fast and efficient as possible.

 

Is this your first time in Romania?

Yes, I’ve never been to Romania before. There are plenty of Romanian software engineers in our London office, so I’m going to be asking them for tips and advice before I hop on the plane over here. Given how bright and fun my colleagues from here are, I expect to have a great time in Romania!

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