Blog

Tag: Internal Tools

Securing Logged Out Internal Settings

Designing and building a security layer

I proposed, built, and maintained the only logged out accessible tooling suite in Meta - which I’ve conveniently called “Logged Out Internal Settings” (hereafter as LOIS). This toolset is still used daily today by employees though it’s no longer as well maintained since I left the company earlier last year. This is part of a series (Project Presentation) where I share stories of my past projects. Subscribe to the newsletter today! You will need to manually get this secret from here Subscribe You can also checkout previous issues here before deciding. Background # At this point, we were still building out a brand new set of access flow that unifies the experience (for login, account recovery, registration) across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger on both iOS and Android. Since the whole thing was internal anyway, people were littering internal-only information everywhere for easier debugging and faster development cycle. Between all that, I built a small tool on the landing page that let engineers quickly switch between different dev pods or prod, and another prototyping tool that lets you add any random UI for quick testing. As we got closer to release, I began thinking how to make this “launch safe”. ...

February 8, 2026

Understanding the Value of Dev Tools

Making the business case for building dev tools

I’m largely approaching this from the perspective of building an internal dev tool (since this is mostly where my personal experiences are coming from), especially if you’re someone who wants to build an internal tool but is having trouble framing it in a way where its value can be understood by the decision makers. I’m also excluding situations where you “have to” build certain tools to track certain information in order to comply with a legal requirement, since I don’t think that would be controversial to comply with. I’d imagine the framework for using an external dev tool, while similar, also poses extra complexity on paying vs building. ...

July 18, 2025

Internal Tooling Ideas

When and what to build for internal tools?

For years, I built and maintained the only logged-out accessible dev tool set / platform at Meta. That earned me some reputation (in a certain circle) of being “the idea guy on internal tools”. Whenever I’m asked about how I keep coming up with good ideas for valuable tools to build, my go-to answer has been “I build tools when I get annoyed while doing my job”. I’ll try to expand that into more details below. ...

July 11, 2025

Early takes on vibe-coding

Is it a mid-level engineer yet?

I keep hearing about vibe-coding and I’ve always written the majority of code myself. While at Meta, I got a chance to try out CodeCompose. It worked really well as an autocomplete but when it tried to do anything more than 5 lines at a time, it would - on many occasions - commit bugs that aren’t immediately obvious at first sight. Generally, I’ve caught them by looking at the generated code and wondering “huh this isn’t how I’d do this, why?”. That said, it definitely helped me code and ship faster especially on mundane tasks. Vibe-coding though, seems like taking it to a whole new level (using even less supervision and care on the code being committed). ...

July 3, 2025