Facebook Parse Acquisition (Part 1) with Charity Majors

Parse was a backend-as-a-service company that started in 2011 with the initial focus of making the cloud easier to use for mobile developers. Parse had several novel engineering challenges. In 2011, it was not easy to build on top of AWS, nor was it easy to build within the young mobile ecosystem.

Charity Majors was an early engineer at Parse, and stayed with the company through its acquisition by Facebook. Charity joins the show to discuss her experience at Parse and her reflections on being part of Facebook after the acquisition. Parse was shut down in 2017, which was a disappointing outcome for Charity.

Charity currently works as the CTO of Honeycomb. In a previous episode, Charity gave some background on her career in software, as well as her perspective on modern problems in observability and DevOps. In this episode, Charity tells the story of joining Parse, working through novel engineering problems, and the feeling of being acquired by a company where she did not feel like a great cultural fit.

It is a useful conversation for anyone interested in engineering culture, company philosophy, and the realities of acquisitions–which can be both painful and profitable for the acquired employees.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Check out our active companies and projects:

• FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. Find a project to work on
• Podsheets is an open source podcast hosting platform built with the learnings from Software Engineering Daily. Our goal is to be the best place to host and monetize your podcast. If you have been thinking about starting a podcast, check out podsheets.com.
• The SEDaily app for iOS and Android includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. Subscribe for ad-free episodes.

Transcript

Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.