Blog

Tag: Project Presentation

FB accounts created without Messenger

tfw you accidentally break FB for millions of new users

This was one of my first experience at causing a SEV. I’ve broken production before 🫣 but not bad enough for it to be a SEV. In this situation, millions of new FB accounts were created (over the duration of the outage) without proper messaging inbox thus unable to use Messenger. I’ll dive more into how this happens below. This is part of a series (Project Presentation) where I share stories of my past projects. ...

November 28, 2025

Leaked `FakeIncorrectPassword`

When your social media break turns into work

It was Thanksgiving day and I was mostly chilling at home scrolling Threads while watching YouTube. I then came across this post: @justinamphlett Found a pretty horrific dark pattern with Instagram. If you try to log in on mobile web, it fails with ‘incorrect password’. I double check… it’s right, it’s just not working. Gave up, installed the app, password is fine. Tried again today just to see… this time I get the following error message. Looks like a translation key is missing and it’s serving me the backend name for it? FakeIncorrectPassword ?? Are you shitting me? ...

October 31, 2025

Shipping a project with -2M MAP

Not everything is your problem

There’s a saying in Meta that ‘Nothing is somebody else’s problem’ but sometimes, it really is. At this point in time, I was working on a growth team whose top-line goal was to grow Facebook MAP (monthly active people). So naturally, it’s surprising for me to have shipped something that directly regressed the very metric the team should be growing. This is part of a series (Project Presentation) where I share stories of my past projects. ...

October 3, 2025