I joined Meta this week. The timing is a bit unfortunate, because it’s just after Trump’s inauguration and there has been some news coverage of that. It’s not a political statement - I accepted the offer three months ago, and my country voted for Brexit.

Either way, I wanted to write a bit about why meta.

Hear me out but I’m starting to think AI, metaverses, mixed reality glasses, social media and social networking are probably going to be pretty important, and I like working on things that matter. I like to fool myself in to imagining that I might be able to bend the arc of the universe a bit, hopefully in a good direction. Meta seems to be right in the middle of pretty much all of the most important technologies that are going to shape the future. I’m excited to work on things that might change the world¹.

Secondly I’m just incredibly excited to see how deploying things at Facebook scale works. I think I’ll learn an absolutely tremendous amount by seeing how a company like Meta, deploying things at the scale Meta does, works. How does CI work on a monorepo? How do you manage a graph of that size? How do you move fast with that number of engineers at that scale? Deliveroo has been a fantastic place to work for the last three years, and I really hope I get to boomerang back there one day, but I want to see what it’s like to ship software at Facebook scale (i.e. world scale). It just sounds fun. I can’t imagine not learning a ton.

TL;dr: I’m optimising for being in a position to work on the technologies that are going to define the future, and for learning as much as I possibly can in the process. Also the money’s good.