Facebook introduces Developer Circles

The developer community has played a large role in Facebook’s success to-date. Facebook continues to focus on giving back to startups, entrepreneurs, and developers to help them succeed. Today, at F8, they announced Developer Circles from Facebook, a new program for developers all over the world to connect, learn, and collaborate with other local developers.

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Driven by Local Communities

Developer Circles is a community-driven program that’s free to join and open to any developer. Each Developer Circle is led by members of the local community who act as leads for the circle, organizing events offline and managing a local online Facebook community. Developer Circles are forums to share knowledge, collaborate, build new ideas, and learn about the latest technologies from Facebook and other industry leaders. Whether a member of a circle is a student learning how to code, a developer looking to turn an idea into a reality, or an experienced coder searching for the latest Facebook product and open source tool updates, Developer Circles empowers a diverse range of technical talent to improve their skills and access the information they need. By fostering stronger communities and creating more technical awareness, our goal is to empower developers, similar to existing Facebook programs like FbStart, which for the past several years has focused on helping early-stage startups succeed.

Supported by Facebook

Developer events, conferences, and hackathons take place everywhere. But we often hear that it’s hard to maintain the momentum, collaboration and knowledge-sharing in between events. With Developer Circles, in addition to hosting meetups and hackathons, each local circle will have a dedicated Facebook Group where members can continue the conversation between meetups. In Facebook Groups, developers can share code, links, videos, and anything else they would already share on Facebook. We are piloting Facebook Groups features with our Developer Circles communities, like social learning units comprised of sequential trainings that allow developers to deepen their knowledge on topics like React and Bots in Messenger.

In addition to fostering online and offline community and collaboration, we want to help developers gain new skills. We are partnering with Udacity, one of the largest online training platforms in the world, to launch custom Facebook training programs for our Developer Circles community, which will be available via Developer Circles Facebook Groups, our website, and on Udacity.

Early Feedback

While the Developer Circles program is still in its infancy, we’ve already seen early potential for the impact it can have on local developer communities.

Victor Hugo, a developer in Mexico City was working on a personal project with Bots in Messenger and was struggling with some technical integration issues. He found a solution to his problem at one of the Developer Circles workshops, and soon became more involved with the community and invited his friends to join. Victor now has a start-up that builds customer service chat bots for companies, and is backed up by a local tech accelerator.

Faten Ghriss, a Developer Circle Lead in Tunis, studied Computer Network and Telecommunication Science in Tunis, but it was a year spent as an exchange student in Minnesota, U.S. that made her realize she wanted to give back to the community. So she went back to Tunisia and co-founded Young Tunisian Coders Academy that teaches children to code. Faten first heard about Developer Circles at a conference she was speaking at and shortly after decided to start her own Circle and hosted her first meetup in March 2017. The meetup, focused on Bots in Messenger, had over 200 registrations, and based on polling the community she is organizing future meetups around virtual reality and machine learning.

Get Involved

People have found new job opportunities, connected to coding bootcamps, and received hands-on support for building with Facebook’s developer products. With Developer Circles from Facebook now open to anyone around the world, we can’t wait to bring more developer communities together. To join, simply head to: developers.facebook.com/developercircles.