mikeyk

ah you’re right, I was off by one! 2008 was the year.

I took CS193P when it was first offered in 2007; one of my favorite classes at Stanford because it was so hands-on. At the time few people had iPhones, so everyone in the class got a free iPod Touch for development. My final project was a photo sharing app with a Polaroid shake to reveal mechanic… lightly influenced Instagram which Kevin and I built a few years later!

Beautiful tribute — you captured Peter perfectly.

Best I’ve found are the ones at Homestate in LA: https://www.myhomestate.com/

IG co-founder here: users 1 and 2 were our first two attempts at creating users end to end when getting Instagram v0.1 hooked up to the backend we'd written. There was a bug so they were left in an incomplete state; post bugfix, 3 was my co-founder Kevin and 4 is me.

Hey Aaron, sorry to hear and thanks for posting. We're hiring at Instagram for roles in NYC, SF and Menlo Park; if you/folks on your team want a direct line feel free to email me and I'll connect them to the right folks on the team.

mike [at] instagram [dot] com.

Browsers are all over the place, unfortunately. It's part of why sRGB because the only reasonable color profile for Web use. I think we'll see wide color become common in apps before the Web.

Just P3, though the wider gamut available in our graphics operations should benefit photos brought in using Adobe RGB too since iOS is fully color managed.

We built this in already! We don't have a "1x" or "2x" indicator, but the dual lens camera is fully used in Instagram now and will do the smart transition between 1x>2x optical and 2x+ digital zoom.

It's getting used more and more in our app--few recent examples are the "Promote Post" UI if you're a business account and want to promote a post from inside Instagram, the Saved Posts feature, and the comment moderation tools we now provide around comment filtering.

Photos only. Apple's APIs only capture in Wide Color when shooting in photo mode, and their documentation only recommends using wide color/Display P3 for images.

I used the same approach as the Webkit image, so the same applies here, too (it's also why we only serve Display P3 photos to iOS clients with wide color screens, most Android devices would treat them incorrectly)

Good to know--I didn't run it through my Pixel. Some devices will do a relative projection from Display P3 to sRGB, which means that it will look "relatively" like it would in Display P3 but projected onto the sRGB color space.

Edited to add: and some other ones are doing something even less fancy, which is just to ignore the color profile entirely and just assume sRGB and display it incorrectly, taking for example what would have been the maximum red point for Display-P3 and making it the maximum red point in sRGB.

Good q. All of it is still Objective C and C++; there's a few blockers to starting to move to Swift, including the relatively large amount of custom build + development tooling that we and FB have in place.

We started using OpenGL in 2011. Our CPU-based image filters used to take 4+ seconds with pixel-by-pixel manipulation, and now can render 30+ times per second.

If you have some sample images where the current image pipeline is going wrong let me know and we can look into improving.

Here if anyone has questions on the implementation or such.

Had the pleasure of working with Ryan when he was at FB--he's one of the best.

We have a follow up to that post coming soon, stay tuned.

Yep, these were all A/B tested and the results were statistically significant.

We load a small thumbnail; it's the extra memory allocated to strings that was the main factor that helped when we reduced the # of comments sent down.

This is primarily a server-gating feature. For the mobile clients, they periodically sync their experiment flags state using a call to the backend (eg at app start), which is handled using a related, but separate, system to Gate Logic.

At Instagram we have split dev and prod enviroments; gates are shared between dev-servers, but split from production.

For testing, we have context managers that let you do "with temporary_gate('gate_name', value)", so there's not much boilerplate in overriding/testing your code within a gate constraint.

We (at IG) aren't claiming to be doing revolutionary things on infrastructure--but one thing I found super valuable when scaling Instagram in the early days was having access to stories from other companies on how they've scaled. That's the spirit in which I encourage our engineers to blog about our DB scaling, our search infra, etc--I think the more open we are (as a company, but more broadly as an industry) about technical approaches + solutions, the better off we'll be.

To clarify, I was teaching things like how to use Windows and how to use an email account, so not coding-related. But yes--by the time I was at Meebo I was already picking up some industry coding experience, though not anywhere near what I'd have had on a more traditional CS degree + pure coding job out of school track.

We've seen huge gains from making the system as realtime as possible. Consider a new user who hasn't followed anyone yet--each new follow is super helpful in informing the recommendation system.

Low lighting means long exposure times which means motion blur trails that look weird once we run them through our stabilizer. Hope you get the chance to try it in brighter lighting at some point.

Hi Colin, all Hyperlapse videos get saved out to your Camera Roll, and no FB or IG account is needed to use the app (there are sharing options for those two in the app, but they aren't a requirement to using it)

Mike from IG here. Here's the direct App Store link while it propagates: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id740146917

Mike (co-founder) from Instagram here. Thank you for raising the issue; it's an important one.

We've been steadily increasing our HTTPS coverage--Instagram Direct, for example, which we launched in late 2013, is 100% HTTPS. For the remainder of the app, especially latency-sensitive read endpoints like the main feed and other browsing experiences, we're actively working on rolling out HTTPS while making sure we don't regress on performance, stability, and user experience. This is a project we're hoping to complete soon, and we'll share our experiences in our eng blog so other companies can learn from it as well.

Mike from IG here. Some early wins are integrations with spam fighting systems, logging infrastructure, and FB's Hive infrastructure.