My internship @Facebook Summer 2019

Thursday. August 15, 2019 - 2 mins

During my internship at Facebook in summer 2019, I learned a lot about engineering in real-world settings. I was assigned to the Crisis Response team. The core product the team works on is the Crisis Response Page. When natural disasters occur(for example, an earthquake), the users can use the page to know if their friends are marked themselves safe and if other people in the affected area are requesting or offering help.

My main projects are on the FBLite interface. FBLite is an interface that generally targets the lower-end devices with less battery and processing power. A large portion of the users of FBLite is from developing countries. I built two main projects on FBLite for the team during the summer.

My first project is to update the top of the page (“Crisis header”) with a new design. The new design looks like below.

Based on the design I went through scoping, coding, polishing, dogfooding(let the member of the team to test the product I built), lodestone testing(let the third-party testers to test the product) and A/B testing(compare the user engagements of the new design with the old one). In the end, the experimentation showed a lot of positive signals on relevant metrics like user engagements and the team decided to ship this new header after discussion.

My second project is to build a unified feed, a more comprehensive feed listing for the Crisis Page. Originally, only two types of posts were shown in the feed: offer help and request help. In the new design, I wanted to include the posts that provided information for the users. For example, a user could post about the traffic status of a road in the affected area without classifying the post as “Offering Help” or “Requesting Help.” The new design looks like below.

In this project, I made the design on my own based on the parity in Facebook IOS/Android. I also went through scoping out the project, coding, polishing, and dogfooding(let the member of the team test the product I built). By the end of my internship, I did not start the lodestone testing(let the third-party testers to test the product) yet.

But if given time, lodestone testing and experimentation would be the next steps for this project.

Aside from my two main projects, I also helped the team build the Volunteering Quick Promotion(it’s a recommendation post that is inserted in the user’s news feed) which was a product the team aimed to launch in July.

I also built the new Mark Safe Quick Promotion that already exists in Facebook IOS/Android. I built the parity in FBLite to improve the user experience in the mark-safe flow (which is letting their friends know that they are safe by clicking “I’m Safe” button). The old(left) and new(right) design of the Mark Safe Quick Promotion are as below.

During the summer, I met a lot of interesting people at FB and knew what to improve on my next journey. Keep on grinding!