MAY 13, 2026
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Today's dispatch · Editor's pick

Reel Friends: Building Social Discovery that Scales to Billions

Engineers on the Facebook Reels team developed the Friend Bubbles feature, which highlights friends' Reels interactions, using a machine learning model that evolved over time. The feature requires complex engineering work to balance behaviors between iOS and Android users, who have distinct interaction patterns. Ultimately, the team discovered a key factor that enabled the feature to function seamlessly, underscoring the importance of nuanced understanding in engineering seemingly simple features.

Engineering at Meta·1 min read·Today·Social / Scale
Reel Friends: Building Social Discovery that Scales to Billions
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Trending this week3 / 463
1Reel Friends: Building Social Discovery that Scales to BillionsEngineering at Meta · 1h ago
2Browser Run: now running on Cloudflare Containers, it’s faster and more scalableCloudflare Blog · 1h ago
3Specs just got faster (and smarter)Kiro · 21h ago

The Digest

463 articles
Engineering1h ago

Reel Friends: Building Social Discovery that Scales to Billions

Engineers on the Facebook Reels team developed the Friend Bubbles feature, which highlights friends' Reels interactions, using a machine learning model that evolved over time. The feature requires complex engineering work to balance behaviors between iOS and Android users, who have distinct interaction patterns. Ultimately, the team discovered a key factor that enabled the feature to function seamlessly, underscoring the importance of nuanced understanding in engineering seemingly simple features.

SocialScale
1 min
Cloudflare1h ago

Browser Run: now running on Cloudflare Containers, it’s faster and more scalable

Cloudflare rebuilt its Browser Run platform on top of Cloudflare Containers, boosting performance, scalability, and reliability. This change increased usage limits to 60 browsers per minute and 120 concurrent browsers, and decreased Quick Action response times by over 50%. As a result of the migration, Cloudflare was able to ship fixes and new features faster, leveraging the flexibility of Cloudflare Containers. The team overcame initial technical hurdles, including latency issues and scaling bottlenecks, by implementing regional pools of pre-warmed browser containers and optimizing their architecture. To enhance scalability and meet the demanding requirements of the platform, Cloudflare migrated from Workers KV to D1 instances and Queues, which significantly improved write throughput and reduced lag times to below 2 seconds. This new approach enabled the team to handle large volumes of requests and efficiently manage browser state, making it a more robust and reliable platform.

NetworkingSecurity
1 min
Kiro21h ago

Specs just got faster (and smarter)

Here's a 3-sentence summary of the blog post: Kiro has introduced improvements to its spec flow, allowing users to run tasks in parallel and generating a dependency graph to minimize wait times. The quick plan mode also streamlines the process by auto-generating requirements, design, and tasks in one pass, while analyzing the user's prompt for clarifications and ambiguities. These updates aim to provide "speed where it helps and depth where it matters", catching subtle issues in requirements analysis and reducing implementation time by up to 75%.

AIDevTools
1 min
Kiro21h ago

Requirements analysis: catching requirement bugs before they become code

Here's a 3-sentence summary of the engineering blog post: To prevent bugs and issues, engineers need to catch requirements bugs before they become code, which can be achieved through a structured workflow and requirements analysis. Requirements analysis detects four types of bugs: wrong level of detail, ambiguity, inconsistency, and incompleteness, which can be challenging to spot using traditional methods. A new optional step in the workflow, requirements analysis uses neuro-symbolic techniques and formal logic to verify requirements and flag potential issues, automating the process of checking generic quality properties such as testability, solution-freeness, unambiguity, consistency, and completeness.

AIDevTools
1 min
The22h ago

TechPays has been acquired by Levels.fyi

Zsombor and author of The Pragmatic Engineer have sold TechPays, a leading tech salary site in Europe, to Levels.fyi. The acquisition aims to provide TechPays with the care and resources it needs, while also integrating European compensation data into Levels.fyi's global pay transparency platform. Levels.fyi will retain the existing TechPays data, ensuring developers can continue to access and utilize it for better compensation negotiation.

CareerIndustry
1 min
Pinterest22h ago

An Engineer’s Guide to Better AI Skills: Implementing a Testing Process to Optimize Agent…

An Engineer’s Guide to Better AI Skills: Implementing a Testing Process to Optimize Agent Performance in Any Repository or SkillAuthor: Daniel ReedThe tech...

Machine LearningData
5 min
Engineering22h ago

Migrating Data Ingestion Systems at Meta Scale

Meta revamped its data ingestion system to enhance reliability at scale. The new architecture shifted from customer-owned pipelines to a self-managed data warehouse service, improving efficiency and scalability. To achieve a successful migration, Meta established a clear migration job lifecycle, verified jobs for correctness, and implemented robust rollout and rollback controls to handle issues during the transition.

SocialScale
1 min
AWS1d ago

Building hybrid multi-tenant architecture for stateful services on AWS

A large-scale ad-serving infrastructure on AWS overcame operational challenges with a hybrid multi-tenant architecture. The previous cellular architecture provided tenant isolation but created scalability, efficiency, and onboarding issues. A new tier-based architecture was designed with cluster-level isolation, using Amazon Route 53 weighted routing and AWS PrivateLink connectivity to improve operational efficiency. This three-level hierarchy allows for independent scaling to address AWS limits, reducing infrastructure setup steps by 80 percent.

CloudArchitecture
1 min
Cloudflare1d ago

When "idle" isn't idle: how a Linux kernel optimization became a QUIC bug

Engineers at Cloudflare discovered a bug in the Linux kernel's CUBIC congestion control algorithm that prevents it from recovering from a congestion collapse event. The issue arises when the congestion window (cwnd) gets permanently pinned at its minimum after a loss event, causing the algorithm to oscillate between recovery and congestion avoidance states. This bug was found in the context of QUIC, where it fails 61% of the time in a test scenario involving heavy loss in the early connection phase.

NetworkingSecurity
1 min
AWS1d ago

Choosing between single or multiple organizations in AWS Organizations

AWS organizations provide a centralized way to manage multiple accounts, offering benefits like consolidated billing, simplified governance, and resource sharing. Enterprises typically adopt a single organization for most customers, but may choose multiple organizations if they have independent business units, regulatory requirements, or strong segmentation needs. This approach provides stronger security isolation and governance flexibility. A single organization is preferred when teams share a corporate security policy, need centralized compliance enforcement, and want to consolidate billing. Multiple organizations are suitable for conglomerates, regulated businesses, or companies with separate leadership and security requirements. The choice between single or multiple organizations depends on balancing operational efficiency with risk isolation.

CloudArchitecture
1 min
Engineering1d ago

Labyrinth 1.1: Making End-to-End Encrypted Backups Even More Reliable

Labyrinth 1.1 improves the reliability of end-to-end encrypted backups in Messenger by allowing messages to reach the encrypted backup in real-time, rather than waiting for the device to come back online. This is achieved through a new sub-protocol that ensures messages survive device loss, changes, and extended sign-in gaps. The update enhances the security and integrity of encrypted message history, making it more accessible to users across devices.

SocialScale
1 min
Stripe2d ago

Five vertical SaaS insights from Sessions 2026

Here are the five insights from the Stripe Sessions 2026 blog post: 1. **Expanding beyond software is key to differentiation**: Vertical SaaS platforms that embed themselves into customers' day-to-day operations through financial services like payments and lending can stay ahead of AI commoditization. Platforms like Toast and GlossGenius have seen significant increases in adoption and revenue growth by making payments a priority. 2. **Deepening operations integration builds a stronger moat**: By offering a multiproduct strategy, platforms can create a stronger financial moat that makes them harder to displace. Moxie's compliance tools and Slice's wholesale rates on pizza boxes are examples of services that are difficult for new AI-native competitors to offer. 3. **Vertical SaaS is finding success offering its own AI products**: 87% of SaaS platforms surveyed believe AI is an opportunity, and many are moving from experimentation to monetization. Platforms like Toast IQ, Quipli, and Clio are adapting to customer

PaymentsInfrastructure
1 min
Kiro4d ago

More room to explore: $20 paid tier sign-up bonus

Kiro has introduced a $20 sign-up bonus for new paid subscribers, doubling the previous credit limit and providing full model access from day one. This change aims to give developers sufficient runway to try Kiro before deciding on its suitability, with users getting access to premium models, including Claude Opus 4.7. The free tier remains unchanged, with free users having access to capable open weight models like Qwen3 Coder Next and DeepSeek v3.2.

AIDevTools
1 min
Pinterest4d ago

Enhancing Ad Relevance: Integrating Real-Time Context into Sequential Recommender Models

Pinterest engineers integrated real-time context into sequential recommender models to enhance ad relevance, particularly on the Related Pins surface. This was achieved through a new Contextual Sequential Two Tower Model architecture, which incorporates a context layer into the query tower and uses synthetic augmented data to learn from real-time context during offline training. The model demonstrated a 3x to 10x increase in Recall@K and a 275-300% increase in candidate median relevance, resulting in a 0.7% lift in conversion-related ROAS.

Machine LearningData
6 min
Netflix4d ago

Scaling ArchUnit with Nebula ArchRules

By John Burns and Emily YuanIntroductionAt Netflix, we operate using a polyrepo strategy with tens of thousands of Java repositories. This means that we need...

StreamingScale
12 min
Kiro5d ago

Introducing Kiro Ambassadors

Kiro Ambassadors is a new program that selects engaged developers to collaborate closely with the Kiro team, providing feedback and influencing the product roadmap. In return, ambassadors receive a free Kiro subscription, early access to new features, and direct communication with the product and engineering teams. They commit to sharing their experience and product knowledge through content, events, and feature testing. The program aims to deepen the influence of developers who are active Kiro users, providing a platform for them to shape the product and drive meaningful technical extensions to the community. Ambassadors dedicate around 3-4 hours per month, including a monthly call with the Kiro engineering team and content creation or event participation.

AIDevTools
1 min
Cloudflare5d ago

Building for the future

Cloudflare's leadership, including Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn, announced a significant workforce reduction of over 1,100 employees due to the increased adoption of AI within the company, requiring a reimagining of internal processes and roles. This change is part of Cloudflare's pivot to a high-growth, AI-driven organization, aiming to create value in the "agentic AI era." Cloudflare is providing generous severance packages to departing employees, including full base pay through the end of 2026 and vested equity.

NetworkingSecurity
1 min
The5d ago

The Pulse: AI load breaks GitHub – why not other vendors?

GitHub's reliability has significantly decreased, with multiple outages and data integrity issues in recent months. A data integrity incident occurred due to a bug that caused incorrect merge commits when using the squash merge method, impacting 2,092 pull requests and requiring customers to manually recover lost commits. GitHub's CTO attributed the reliability woes to a load spike from AI agent fuelled requests, which they are struggling to handle, despite a modest 3.5x load increase over two years.

CareerIndustry
1 min
Cloudflare6d ago

How Cloudflare responded to the “Copy Fail” Linux vulnerability

Cloudflare's Security and Engineering teams quickly assessed the Linux kernel "Copy Fail" vulnerability upon public disclosure on April 29, 2026. They evaluated the exploit technique, checked exposure across their infrastructure, and validated that their existing behavioral detections could identify the exploit pattern within minutes. As a result, there was no impact to the Cloudflare environment, no customer data was at risk, and no services were disrupted at any point. Cloudflare's established procedures ensure that they have already deployed patches for critical vulnerabilities, in this case, allowing them to respond proactively to the issue.

NetworkingSecurity
1 min
Cloudflare6d ago

When DNSSEC goes wrong: how we responded to the .de TLD outage

Cloudflare's public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1 experienced significant outages due to incorrect DNSSEC signatures published by the Germany's top-level domain (TLD) .de operator DENIC. This led to Cloudflare returning SERVFAIL for .de-related queries, impacting millions of domains. To mitigate the issue, Cloudflare temporarily treated .de as an insecure zone, bypassing DNSSEC validation, although this made .de domains vulnerable to attacks. Cloudflare's "serve stale" feature also kicked in, continuing to serve cached records and reducing the impact of the outage.

NetworkingSecurity
1 min