Facebook for Developers, in collaboration with PlanX, conducted a one day workshop on Thursday 3rd November, 2016. Facebook for Developers helps you build new platforms, grow and monetize your app. This program provides developers with what they can do in collaboration with Facebook to enable them to share and grow their applications.
Sarim Aziz, the Strategist Product Partnership at Facebook mentioned that “there are lots of exciting products and services being built not just for the Pakistani market but others all over the world. We wanted to spend time with talent here to figure out how we solve problems and how we build products for engineers here.”
“This is the 6th Facebook for Developers workshop we’re having in the world and we see some good engagement here in Lahore.”
This was a full-day workshop from Facebook, designed for priority partners. During the workshop, trainers from Facebook Product, Partnerships, and Engineering teams engaged with the attendees, using hands-on instruction via code-labs, tech talks, and updates on the latest Facebook Platform products that were designed to help the developers build and grow a successful business.
The Developers workshop was delivered by software engineers and product managers across industries, and attendee’s had the option to attend 1 of the 3 workshops streams on Account Kit, Bots on Messenger and React Native.
For the account kit, Andrey Belokrylov, Software Engineer from the Facebook Platform Login team and Ethan Goldman-Kirst, Software Engineer Identify Tools Team were there. They talked about why they made the account kit, why it should be used and what needs to be done with this Facebook tool.
The second workshop was Bots on Messenger – which offered a new way for businesses and developers to engage with their users, through Facebook messenger conversations. The trainers talked about how to build a good product, the policies that the bot has to follow and lastly the best practices on bot experiences. This workshop was delivered by Adnan Majeed, Software Engineer in the Traffic team at Facebook New York and Hasnain Lakhani Software Engineer, Program Analysis at Facebook California.
The last workshop held was by React Native. It was delivered by Abdullah Jibaly Software Engineer Oculus at Facebook and Umair Sadiq, Software Engineer at Facebook in Large Scale Distributed Systems. React Native is designed to help developers learn transferable skills so they can write native applications in IOS and Android for Javascript. Essentially it helps developers save time by not having to learn multiple platforms and languages, and still share as much common code as possible.
Dr. Umar Saif, Chairman Punjab IT Board gave a closing note after the workshops, saying;
“We need one tech startup from Pakistan to go big and become a billion dollar company and we will see investment pouring into our ecosystem. Facebook coming to Pakistan and arranging workshops for developers is definitely a step in the right direction.”
I applied , but did not receive any confirmation email.