👋 engineering @browsercompany formerly @facebook & @instagram
- Tweets 464
- Following 290
- Followers 4,979
- Likes 987
We still have a long road ahead but...
Here’s a little sneak peek at an early version of Arc on Windows ✨
It is nice to see Arc start to take shape, and we are sprinting to share the first built with some brave folks this winter 👀
77
95
1,352
129,809
What if your browser was actually more of an internet computer?
With room for your files, downloads, archived tabs, and all the things most important to you— in one place
Today we shipped Library 2.0 to @arcinternet bringing this dream of an internet computer a lil bit closer💕
38
56
1,145
213,449
Leaving a cushy job at a big tech company can be really scary. A lot of people stay at a job just because it's comfortable, or because they are scared to leave.
I'd like to share some tips that would have helped make my decision to join a startup less daunting:
14
48
658
It's alive ✨ First glance at the @arcinternet command bar live on Windows!
13
31
616
58,846
Arc on Windows and we did it in Swift. So proud of this team.
We are just getting started
17
10
533
63,496
I just left my job at @facebook / @instagram to join @browsercompany. Some quick takeaways from my first week 😊
/thread
21
17
502
6 months ago I left @Facebook to join @browsercompany and it was the best decision I ever made for my career. Here is some advice I would have given myself on day 1
/thread
4
20
473
One of my favorite unreleased features 😊 Huge props to @adamstern_ for the initial prototype!
19
11
359
67,676
So unbelievably proud of the team that has brought Arc to Windows. It's been a long time coming… and it is finally here!
We still have a lot of work cut out for us - this is just day 1. Coming 🔜are many of your favorite mac features, Windows 10, and so much more!
16
17
311
38,540
It's been just over a year working at @browsercompany and I wanted to give a few thoughts. Before I joined the (at the time, 5-person) team, I was incredibly apprehensive about what startup life would be like.
/thread
4
12
141
(2) So many 3rd party tools (@github, @zoom_us, @PairWithTuple, @NotionHQ to name a few) - at FB nearly everything was built in house. Working with these external tools makes me feel like I am more in touch with the current state of the industry
4
1
132
My folder don’t jiggle jiggle
The wonderful @alexandracoding has been working on this for you, Zee! How does this look to you?
2
3
120
My most significant impact at @browsercompany may have been this insurrection 😂
🤩 @MKBHD says he loves "Arc" 🤩
(...plus the story of when @alexandracoding almost quit @browsercompany bc of what i wanted to name it instead...)
4
2
103
24,327
Today marks 2 years at @browsercompany! What do they say about time flying when you’re having fun?
I’ve had the chance to watch this company grow from 5 people to nearly 40… and I’ve learned a lot from seeing our organization scale.
1
2
99
We are working with design at Microsoft on this :) This is a *very* early version of the product, just wanted to take you all on the journey!
5
1
86
3,488
Giving good feedback is a skill - especially in the tech industry where feedback is considered a gift. Some advice to ensure your feedback lands in the way you intend it:
1
9
85
The @browsercompany is hiring more product engineers! We’re ex-Instagram, Pinterest, etc. but open to all backgrounds and geos. Diverse backgrounds and experience with iOS/Swift a plus. Please email hello@thebrowser.company if you are interested, or just DM me!
6
12
87
✨ No decision is permanent ✨
Leaving a big company can feel like a huge decision, but in tech it's common to flow through all sorts of companies. Don't be scared of making a decision for fear that it is the wrong one. It is easier than you think to change your mind.
1
2
76
✨ There's always reasons to not do something if you're looking for them ✨
You will always be in the middle of a project, you'll always be waiting for the next promotion. There is never a 'right' time to leave a company where you are comfortable, so don't wait for it.
2
2
76
For the 2nd official women’s offsite at @browsercompany we went to a tapestry making class, which as it turns out was just weaving a visual representation of each of our personality types
1
5
74
✨ No one will be mad at you for leaving ✨
When leaving Facebook, I was worried that I would be upsetting my mentors and colleagues because they had invested so much time in building my skills. But this wasn't the case — good mentors just want the best for you!
1
3
68
✨ You do not need to be unhappy to look for a change ✨
A misconception I had was that people would wait until they were unhappy to look for something new. You can be really happy and fulfilled, and still find a better opportunity for yourself somewhere else.
1
3
68
Well, here we are a year later - not eager to re-join big tech, and so happy in startup world. But I also am not anxious should I choose to in the future — big tech will always be there, but @browsercompany felt like once in a lifetime.
4
5
71
✨ Trust yourself! ✨
Finally, and it's a cliche, but: trust your instincts. Having the itch to try something new is reason enough to explore!
3
1
65
In fact I would recommend that you specifically don't wait until you are unhappy to look for a new job. It will actually be harder to make a decision when you're clouded by urgency and burnout.
1
1
66
(4) I have learned so many new technologies - with a smaller team I find it even more important to have context on as much of the stack as I can, which means my brain is *constantly* downloading new information
66
Question everything. The systems at a startup are not set in stone. When a company is young, architecture and ideas can always be changed. But systems will only be updated if you are actively questioning & improving them
1
6
66
Embrace the uncertainty. Big tech is incredibly structured - the startup world is not, in the most exciting way possible
1
1
63
And finally, enjoy every moment. You’re in for the ride of your life, and 6 months will go by before you know it
1
1
60
I'll cut to the punchline, no! :)
But we did start there. Our first prototypes were Electron based browsers. It was the easiest way to get off the ground running - what Electron lacked in some areas (eg, performance), it made up for in iteration speed & low technical overhead
2
3
57
It is okay to not know the answer. Coming from FB where I was the owner of a large portion of the codebse, it was incredibly difficult to jump into a new system where I knew nearly nothing. But the state of not knowing is also where there is the most opportunity to grow
1
1
57
Multiply your time estimations. Building something from scratch is like the Wild West, you never know what roadblocks you may find yourself up against, or how long a workaround may take
1
3
53
Been a wild few weeks starting product engineering on our Windows team.
Huge props to the team for making it possible to build with Swift on Windows - @steven_brix, @wendylidev, @compnerd, @PvF, @darinwf, @renatomangini, @hursh, Tristan. Onwards!
50
7,650
(1) first and foremost I have never met a group of people more excited about browsers. The enthusiasm is completely infectious & makes for a great product development environment
2
1
52
You may be concerned that you will not be able do the same thing somewhere else. It is not a coincidence that you accomplished this the first time, if you did it once, you can do it again.
1
1
49
✨ Don't be afraid to mess up a 'good thing' ✨
If you have spent years at a company building your reputation, advancing up the ladder, and developing relationships, it can be intimidating to think about 'starting over' somewhere new.
1
1
52
It is really upsetting that it has been 6 months since I had covid and I still cannot smell my morning coffee.
2
6
47
With feedback from 1,000+ members, this was the biggest beta we’ve ever had for a new feature and we’re so grateful for all of the time.
So much ❤️ from @sherryshao_ @elfanek @jasdev @merowing_ @dustin @jmtrivedi @jedimodi
Can’t wait to see this evolves & learn from you all!
45
6,742
Be nimble. You may come across something that completely changes the way your product could work. Embrace that change
1
2
44
I have never considered any coding language superior to another but once you’ve written swift extensions you really can never go back
1
1
42
Just met @mollyfmielke in person and can share with the internet that she is way taller than you would expect
1
41
Non-engineers love to ask “what languages do you know?” and then you get to explain that so many programming languages are practically the same it’s just about googling the right syntax
3
1
40
The experience I probably miss most from writing code at FB is stacked diffs. It was SO easy to split diffs/PRs and have “1 idea” per change set. I has no clue this was not a widely available feature in industry.
9
3
35
When I tell friends that @browsercompany is building a new browser, they often think we are actually building a search engine. People mentally tie the act of using the internet to the act of search & have trouble picturing an internet where they don’t feel lost / need to search
2
37
Our investment in cross-platform swift has paid off here! Our sync engine is written in Swift and works everywhere, and thanks to Swift’s native C++ interop, it can even integrate with cross-platform C++ libraries.
1
1
33
3,572
A year at a startup, and I feel 5+ big-tech years wiser. I didn’t even know that browser would be here a year later — everyone told me that startups fail and I should make a 1 year plan, so I did. I knew that if in a year browser had failed, I would try to return to big tech.
1
3
36
Why don’t people like phone calls? I love them. You can have a 30 minute text conversation in 30 seconds, and they are so much more personal than some words on a screen
7
1
35
We are working hard to bring Sync to Arc Search - @MayaRosmarin is on it! Making Arc your home on the internet, wherever you are.
1
30
3,243
However, through a lot of creativity from the engineering team, we've been able to maintain our iteration speed & prototype culture, making it so easy that even our designers can push code to our product
1
32
After an engineer leaves a big tech company, I wonder how long it takes on average for all of their code to be refactored out of the codebase
1
30
I thought I was good at googling for answers when I worked in big tech, but that was nothing compared to when I joined a startup. When you aren't at a company where there is always someone with the answer, you get a lot better at finding it yourself.
1
30
As soon as I opened my eyes to the world outside of big tech, I felt so much more in touch with the industry. Slack, Notion, Tuple, Figma — all new tools that many people in tech had years of experience with, but I was learning about for the first time.
1
30
“We are not building a web browser” — we are building something better browsercompany.substack.com/…
2
29
4/ Things change fast!
Already in the past 2 years, I feel like we have had many different phases of @browsercompany. Yet we are still worlds away from introducing the processes that exist at companies with 1000+ people. I'm excited to see what stage is next!
1
28
At Instagram, every tool had a full team supporting it. Everything that needed to be done had already been done before. At browser, we were learning how to do something for the first time - and our tools, support, and systems were only as good as we made them.
1
1
25
We use browsers to "read" from the internet, but what if they let us "write" to it, as well?
From Blogger to Twitter and Medium, @ev and @goldman popularized web publishing as we know it.
Today, we're welcoming them (back) to the team, as investors in the @browsercompany 💙
3
21
Incredibly excited to be working with these amazing people
Meet the @browsercompany's newest investors <3
Zoom's @ericsyuan
Stripe's @patrickc
Instagram's @mikeyk
Salesforce's @btaylor
LinkedIn's @reidhoffman
Coinbase's @emiliemc
GitHub's @natfriedman
Facebook's @fidjissimo
...and many more heroes:
⛅️ seriesa.thebrowser.company/
1
1
22
Pair programming is easier over @tuple than it is in person. I forgot how difficult it was to crowd around a laptop and try to explain syntax using a single keyboard and mouse
2
20
Engineering The 7 Noble
Projects Gases
🤝
Expanding to take up all the time and space you give them
2
1
21
Built in native web search was one of those “this could fundamentally change the way I use the internet” type of projects
Another experiment from @browsercompany: built-in native web search 🔍
i search the web all the time! why do i have to go to a ~website~ to see the results? why not just show them inline?
we tried it!
turns out.. it's not much faster & it feels a bit cramped. c'est la vie!
2
21
I was 100% remote while spinning down at @instagram & spinning up at @browsercompany. This made for the smoothest job transition I could have imagined.
The high level aspects of my day are nearly identical - sit at same desk, sign on to computer, VC with coworkers, code, etc.
1
22
It is crazy how people in finance do version control by manually sending each other different versions of the same excel spreadsheet
2
18
It blows my mind that we were able to put humans on the moon in 1969 using a computer that had 100,000x less processing power than an iPhone.
1
20
My DMs are opened - this past year has been the most rewarding of my career. If you have any questions about life at @browsercompany, please reach out!
Fifth, and most important – please DM anyone on our team (e.g. @heyvrk @alexandramedway @jedimody @karlamickens @hursh ) – if you’re curious about learning more about our eng roles.
(A super concrete “jobs” page and set of outreach options is coming soon, too)
DM to frenz plz
19
Next level remote work is a persistent video chat with @codeblue87 @jasdev and @Connor while we are independently on two separate @tuple calls
4
18
I’ve been hearing my friends from @Facebook complain about writing reviews this last week and let me tell you - I do not miss PSC one bit
4
17