Skip After Meta

Facebook allowed us to open source both Hack and Skiplang so we could share both with the larger engineering community. I eventually decided to leave Facebook (now Meta) to build on the work of Hack and Skiplang and develop technologies that would address the same challenges we had at Facebook but for engineers generally. To do this, SkipLabs needed to incorporate two new technologies to make the work we did at Facebook usable in a normal engineering context.

Coping with success

I joined a much-smaller-than-today’s Facebook in 2011 to work on what would eventually become the developer tools team. At the time I joined, the engineering team was in the hundreds and the tools we had for development were, well, not great. PHP was the backbone of almost everything, with millions of lines of code. JavaScript was secondary, and only a few critical services ran on other languages. The company was scaling rapidly, and our development practices weren’t keeping up.

As the codebase grew, so did the difficulty of maintaining and improving it. Facebook became much more feature rich and simple enhancements became complicated and error prone. Often new features needed to operate conditionally on how other preexisting features were already operating. Essentially with each new layer of features teams added, state management became a greater concern.

We’re pleased to share the alpha release of the Skip Framework, an open source (MIT license) system for building and running reactive backend services.

Skip gives Typescript developers a simple declarative way to implement and run read-mostly features and services that are performant, transparent and continuously updated. The framework handles all the complexities of state management, integrations and failure handling in the process.