A little more information about the technical track at f8

f8 gives everyone a chance to come together and shop-talk about what folks have learned over the past year, what's brewing right now, and what the future of Facebook Platform can and should be. During the technical track sessions, we'll have discussions about site and application scalability, what makes a useful and capable application, and the best ways to communicate with users about your application, all focusing on new stuff we've built to make all of these challenges much easier. We also want to share some insight into how we're thinking about one of the other great spaces of application -- the mobile app. You'll hear some of our top engineers talk about the way we built the technology (and how we've tackled some of the hard problems that came along the way), and we know we can benefit big time from hearing your own thoughts on all of these subjects.

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p> The track includes four separate sessions, so you can choose which ones sound interesting to you:

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p> 3:30-4:15pm Building to Facebook Scale
David Braginsky and Serkan Piantino

Learn how Facebook scales some of our key services to billions of requests per day. (Hint: It's our architectural toolset). Taking our beloved News Feed system as a case study, our engineers walk through building its architecture with the help of Facebook's architectural tools like Thrift and Scribe.

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p> 4:30-5:15pm Advanced App Building
Charlie Cheever and Sasha Rush

It's easy to build a simple Facebook app in a few hours, but successful developers spend a lot of time understanding the ins and out of Platform. In this talk, engineers behind Facebook Platform will reveal the inside tricks for putting together a responsive, robust application. Fast track your application's page generation and page rendering performance by learning tried-and-true app design patterns, including smart uses of the API, FQL improvements, advanced features of FBJS, and more.

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p> 6:00-6:45pm Feed and Social Distribution
Ari Steinberg, Jerry Cain, and Tom Whitnah

Social distribution channels like News Feed, requests, and notifications offer some of the most powerful features available to Facebook Platform applications. Three engineers behind all this show how to design even more compelling examples of these with a fierce two-pronged attack: an overview of some fresh new technical capabilities, and guidelines for using these channels effectively. Hot from the oven are the new Publisher, Feed templates with new story sizes and aggregation hooks, revised Feed forms, announcement notifications, and indispensable stats and monitoring.

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p> 7:00-7:45pm Made for Mobile
Jed Stremel and Pedram Kayani (Q&A with Joe Hewitt)

Mobile is everywhere. On Facebook Platform, too. These devices are opening up and creating new opportunities to build Facebook applications that extend beyond the Web, for ten million mobile users and growing (fast!). Jed, Pedram, and Joe give insights into mobile application development and show you how to get started using Facebook's new development framework for the Apple iPhone.

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p> The sessions are designed to be a conversation. Our speakers will start off showing you both what we've been creating and what we've learned along the way. Then, in true social style, we invite you to share your reactions, thoughts, and ideas with our engineers and each other, the people who together make all this happen.

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p> Can't wait to see you there.