Making life better with custom DevTools: Story of Facebook and Flipper

There are quite a lot of great dev tools available "out of the box" and they can cover quite a lot of cases. But sometimes you have to build tailor-made, custom ones.

The main outcomes for the audience:

• When you should consider building custom dev tools; when it's better to avoid this path;
• Ideas on how to organize the work around it;
• How to measure the success of it (e.g. how to make sure that work is worth the effort, e.g. how to sell it to your boss);
• Concrete ideas to start with.

Timur and Michel are going to tell about challenges they face at Facebook and why these challenges are matching the "custom" dev tools way. They will keep ideas and examples relevant to a wider audience.

Most of the examples will be around Flipper and plugins for it.

Speakers will cover the basics of Flipper, its architecture, and existing open sourced plugins capabilities, but they will focus on how to build your ones. Even though most of the examples will be based on Flipper, speakers will briefly cover other surfaces such as IDE extensions and browser dev tools — most of the principles are platform-agnostic.