March 2017 meetup: Realm & Moving Mountains

For our last meetup of the winter, we headed to Facebook NY to learn from Tom Wilson (Blue Apron) and Jason Sendros (Facebook). The Facebook recruiting team were amazing as usual and treated our group to pizza, beer, and plenty of refreshments from their impressive refrigerator in the event room. Kang Zhang (Instagram) welcomed the group on behalf of our sponsor before Kevin introduced Tom to kick off talks.

Tom discussed Realm and its powerful new database. He went over tradeoffs that every developer should consider, as well as tips and tricks to get the most out of using Realm. Tom’s number one tip: “Realm is awesome, but make sure it fits your needs before jumping in blindly. In particular, things like partial updates are much trickier in Realm than in other database systems.”

Jason walked the group through working with critical pieces of infrastructure without disturbing other developers or users. Jason advises, “If you’re going to rewrite a part of your code base, make the change incrementally.”

Many thanks to the Facebook AV team for recording the talks and Q&A!.
See you all next month at Vimeo on April 19th!

Until next time,
Olivia