Improving performance with background data prefetching

The Instagram community is bigger and more diverse than ever before. 800m people now visit every month, 80% of whom are outside of the United States. As the community grows, it becomes more and more important that our app can withstand…

Profiling CPython at Instagram

Instagram employs Python in one of the world’s largest settings, using it to implement the “business logic” needed to serve 800 million monthly active users. We use the reference implementation of Python, known as CPython, as the runtime used to execute our code. As we’ve…

App modularization and module lazy loading at Instagram and beyond

Instagram prides itself on having a lean app. But as the number of engineers and features grows, so do the challenges to size. We start to face issues like:

• increase in application size…

Organizing for Outcomes: How Instagram Derived Form from Function and Set-Up Engineering for Long-Term Success

An excerpt of this article originally appeared in Harvard Business Review.