Facebook’s Best Hacks of 2015

Facebook’s famous hackathons have spawned many a new product and feature, and emerging markets product manager Chris Marra looked back at the social network’s favorite hacks of 2015.

Marra said in a blog post:

Every year, we host a number of hackathons across the globe, where teams come together for a few days to brainstorm, build for fun or craft innovative solutions to sticky problems. The passion people have for the ideas generated in this space outside of their daily work results in everything from new products to open-source tools for the developer community. Here are a few of our favorite features that have hackathon roots and that debuted in 2015.

The hacks highlighted by Marra were:

·         A prototype for Facebook-owned Oculus VR and other virtual reality systems that uses the standard React library to allow developers to write code while wearing VR headsets.

·         Moving optics to the middle of top-of-rack switch boards, making cooling easier, improving signal integrity and reducing power consumption.

·         The rainbow filter for profile pictures in support of the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, which was developed in just 72 hours.

·         Stetho, a debugging platform for Android that gives developers access to the Web-based Chrome Developer Tools.

·         Boomerang, the stand-alone application from Instagram that converts groups of photos into high-quality videos. Marra noted that Boomerang was the first app globally launched by Instagram on Android and iOS simultaneously.

·         Warp Speed Data Transfer, an embeddable library and command line tool for transferring data between two distributed, replicated databases as quickly as possible.

·         The ability for users to add the OpenPGP public key to their profiles and encryptnotification emails from Facebook.