By Chris Homer - @chrishomer
I was at F8 today and thought I might as well flush out my notes and post them here instead of buried in evernote.
Overall, solid day at a conference. My general take on it is that it is more of a "Product Manager's" conference than a developer's conference. Still very interesting but no hackathon, no labs, little code level talk in sessions. Of course at an early stage company, the lines blur and even at thredUP there are aspects of my job that fit closer with Product than engineering. That said, the announcements and topics were thought provoking and what follows are my notes built out with some additional "musings".
Keynote
Zuck kicked things off with a review of the last year and some announcement "hints" before handing it off to others to talk Messenger & Parse. The most impactful part of his talk was his discussion about bugs. Bugs are something that every startup has to deal with. Moving fast enough to "figure it out" almost always means you leave a trail of debris behind you. Sometimes you can clean it up, sometimes you can't. Until the last few years, Facebook has allowed many bugs to fester. Last year they committed to reaching a 48 hour resolution on all "major bugs". They hit that. This year they are committing to resolving 90% of ALL BUGS within 30 days. This is great to hear and quite inspiring. One of the crucial aspects of this commitment is their willingness to be completely open about their progress against this goal. Their system reports the status publicly and I love it. Wondering how we can work towards the same at thredUP. Not necessarily publicly, but fully visible to everyone at the company and something we are much more conscious of and held to.
The Celebrity Sighting
While over checking out the Oculus demo area, I turned to my left and there was a "posse" plowing past me towards the "teleport" demo. At the head of the pack was the 5' 9" curly haired mogul (zuck) with about 25 people in tow. I was struck by how it reminded me of a similar scene when I was at Microsoft and Bill Gates showed up at six flags during a company party. Pretty entertaining to watch actually, but it was also instructive - his poise and confidence was palpable. He was CLEARLY in charge and had everyone hanging on each word and move.
Session 1: Parse
I have been spending a lot of time thinking about our systems and our architecture at thredUP. The path we are on is generally towards a micro-services infrastructure but it's a long-term evolution. Something I like to ask myself is, "what are the alternatives we haven't considered?". Parse seems to provide a new alternative. While I could never see our entire company and app on parse, I could certainly see how 90+% of the shopping experience could be driven through a backend built on Parse. Today it's a Ruby on Rails app/API slowly moving towards a more thoughtful API structure. However, were I to embark on the project today, I would definitely consider Parse for a good chunk. Turning over server infrastructure and much of the boilerplate backend is appealing as it focuses your attention on the value-add for your application rather than reinventing what Facebook/Parse has solved.
The announcements from Parse included better Internet of Things support, some developer tools updates and integration into React. The React integration was the most intriguing to me. At thredUP, we are investing serious time and energy in planning a rebuild of our Ecommerce Customer Experience. For the web application, we have chosen to go with NodeJS & React. What Parse announced today is a plugin for React so that instead of building out the full Flux pattern, you delegate the dispatcher and stores to the plugin and Parse. At first it seemed to violate everything that I love about Flux. But then I began to see the simplification it introduced and I think it's worth a look. If nothing else, it probably provides a good example of a way to abstract away the boilerplate of Flux. Reflux, Fluxible and others do this too, but none are simple and they are in fact very complex.
Session 2: Facebook Login & Graph Updates
This session was interesting but only a few things of note from my perspective:
Direct Support - Facebook is introducing a 1:1 chat support service with developers on staff. They have opened this up to anyone at F8 with 6 months free. Going to try this out.
Login Manager - With the updates to the SDK comes a new component that seems to abstract away some of the complexity of dealing with sessions and authentication in iOS and Android apps. Pretty interesting an worthy of time.
user_posts permission - Looks like you will be able to request permission to dig into a users news feed and related graph nodes/edges. Pretty interesting and powerful. I could definitely see value to crunching it for things like sentiment analysis, pro-active CS engagement, and interests & recommendations.
Providing a Great Login Experience - this was the most valuable topic I thought. They talked about the practice of "requiring" permissions and how it sours the user experience. Some may be truly required, but usually they are not. They also talked about how low the "decline" rates are with permissions and how it's not worth hard requires that block the user from proceeding. The framework they discussed for designing a login flow was "Value, Respect, Reliable". Value refers to communicating the value of sharing your information and they used Shazam as the example. Respect refers to being respectful of you users' right to privacy and allowing them an experience while they "get to know" your app/company/service. Reliability refers to the testing and thorough work put into your flow - if it's not bug-free, intuitive and fast, it's a big problem. None of this is rocket science, but was a good reminder that this is the first impression you have with new users, make it count.
Session 3: Facebook Messenger
The session itself was a little disappointing. I was expecting more out of it and it was just kind of "ok". There were some promising nuggets and food for thought in the broader announcements around messenger as a platform and messenger for business.
Messenger as a platform - the big thing here is sharing through messenger and allowing a conversation to take place from your app, through messenger and then back to your app. I am not sure what this means for thredUP yet but some thoughts come to mind around "shopping with your friends", "building outfits for your friends", "gift lists" etc.
Messenger for business - this is the bigger opportunity I think. It's early days but the gist of it is that a user could ask that we send a receipt to messenger for them. This would deliver their receipt to their phone or to their inbox on facebook. The user could then reply right there to ask questions or get help. In addition, we could provide real-time fulfillment and shipping updates along the way and possibly ask for feedback post purchase. They are currently focused on the after-sale experience but I would love to explore integrating with them in pre-sales for live onsite chat and maybe even co-browsing assistance.
Oculus
No real business application here yet - unless someone wants to hack on a 3D immersive shopping experience with Unity :)
But, the new demo - codenamed "Crescent Bay" was AMAZING. I would love to set that up in the office in one of our conference rooms. It was so completely immersive and it almost felt real. There were times where I wanted to reach out and touch what I saw and in one scene with bullets, explosions and shrapnel flying in slow motion, I felt like I was in the matrix and needed to start dodging bullets. Can't wait for it's release.
