Facebook's main mobile developer left the company

Mobile developer Joe Hewitt said in a blog post on Friday about leaving Facebook:

Today was my last day on Facebook. Usually, when I quit, I curse the management with the thought that I should have left much earlier. In the case of Facebook, I sent sincere letters to all my managers, thanking them for giving me the privilege to work there, and I really didn’t prevaricate. Facebook was the company where I worked the longest, as well as the best employer I have ever had.

He recently worked on integrating Facebook into Android after leaving the iPhone team due to his disagreement with Apple’s policies. Hewitt was responsible for creating the Facebook application for the iPhone, which is currently the most frequently downloaded application for the iPhone of all time. And before the App Store, he created an iPhone version of Facebook, which was also very popular.

He describes his work on Facebook as follows:

Working on Facebook is like having your own startup, but with a salary instead of cheap noodles. Management gave me the opportunity to work on my own ideas, and, as with real startups, some of my projects never go out of the lab, while others are used and made a huge success. The brilliance of Facebook’s management is that it encourages everyone to take the initiative, take risks and engage in as many projects as possible. I wish more tech companies were run like this.

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Before joining Facebook (where he got after buying Facebook from his Parakey company), Hewitt was involved in various open source projects. He is called one of the creators of the original Firefox and his authorship is the first version of the Firebug extension, which he considers his best project.

Regarding his future, he wrote:

And so, I am now independent, and I’m going to work on understanding the needs of modern developers and designers, and creating software to meet these needs. There are so many possibilities that I cannot even predict what I will eventually do, but I’m sure I know where I’m going to start. I can not wait.