"Democratizing ML" is a hot topic these days - particularly in industry. Efficiency, composability and accessibility of machine learning technology are active areas of investment for many research and product groups. Unfortunately, while machine learning has the potential to fundamentally improve how software is constructed, opportunities to leverage machine learning to improve more conventional developer tools (languages, compilers, and IDEs for example) have largely gone untapped.

At Facebook we see an opportunity in this challenge. Our Developer Infrastructure team is on a mission to fundamentally rethink and retool Facebook's developer toolchain by applying machine learning at every layer in our stack. Our goal is to make our developers more productive, and our processes and infrastructure more efficient, by deeply integrating ML into our programming languages and developer tools (such as IDEs, version control, or continuous integration systems) in novel ways.

 

This talk will detail the work our team has done to improve developer efficiency and resource utilization at Facebook - from updating the Hack programming language to support probabilistic programming techniques, to developing a new suite of AI-driven developer tools. I'll describe the lessons we've learned along the way, as well as future opportunities we see to optimize or auto-tune other common pieces of developer infrastructure