Facebook Developer Garage, Hyderabad

After being successful in several cities across the globe, Facebook Developer Garage finally came to the city where Facebook India office is located - Hyderabad. The idea of the Garage is to offer attendees a great insight into Facebook Open Graph and discuss about new technical ideas. The first edition of Developer Garage was organized at Hotel Golkonda, Hyderabad and was sponsored by Facebook itself, Intel and iridiumInteractive. David Recordon and Jonathan Hsu from Facebook gave an insight into the Facebook platform and talked about some of the open source projects which Facebook is working on.

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Highlights

• The event was kick started by Siddharth from iridiumInteractive who was also the host for the event. He talked about the evolution of social media, its need and the role of it in our life.
• David from Facebook was the next speaker. His presentation was all about Open Graph API and Social plug-ins. He started with the Facebook usage stats and the work culture at Facebook. "A lot of Facebook work starts as a hack". Then, he briefed the capabilities of the Graph API. The API has been built with the goal of making it simple and modern. Graph API supports simple authentication of OAuth 2.0. Real-time updates is another exciting thing part of the Graph API. Know more the Graph API here.
• Jonathan’s talk was focused on the technical pieces involved in Facebook. He walked us though the technical overview of the Facebook application. He introduced to us some of the open source projects contributed by Facebook. Some of the notable ones include Thrift, HipHop for PHP, Cassandra, etc. Facebook uses a wide spectrum of technology. PHP for UI. MySQL database. Apache Web Server. MemCached for caching. Varnish as HTTP accelerator. Other open source initiatives from Facebook can be found here.
• Then, it was time for the application developers to share their experiences in developing Facebook applications. Hasan from Merxius shared his experience in building Facebook application for football fans. He talked about the different monetization methods available for Facebook developers – Impression Ads, Pay per click Ads, Social Ads.
• The most exciting part of the event was catching up with Kalpana, the first Facebook India employee. Before joining Facebook, she has with Google for around six years. I have interacted with her earlier on twitter and just got the chance to catch up with her in person. She appreciated some of my scripts and gave me suggestions to improve them. She also expressed her interest in testing few other scripts that I am currently working on. Thanks for the appreciation. That will definitely boost my morale to do more. :)

Lowlights

• It looked like some of the developer sessions were planned on the fly. It would have been great had the agenda been planned in advance. Wish there were hands-on sessions as well.
• No free WiFi and poor mobile wireless signal. This has been a major hindrance for me in live tweeting / blogging.

Overall, it was a good learning experience. Came to know about some of the cool things Facebook is working on. Hoping that the events in the future get better from here on.

-- Varun