While working on my Computer Science degree, I didn’t realize how critical storytelling would be for my work until I joined Microsoft. I started out working on the Just-in-time Compiler for the Common Language Runtime when the C# programming language was taking off and on C++ development tools in Visual Studio. These projects provided many opportunities to talk about my team’s work. Whether debugging systems or presenting project progress to leadership, I started to notice the importance of storytelling. I observed the difference between people who presented their work effectively and those who didn’t. When it came to figuring out what to say about projects (the story) and how to say it (the telling), some communicated better than others, which became a determinant to the success or failure of their technical work.

Fast forward to today, after over a decade of leading engineering teams at Meta, it has become clear to me how important storytelling is to technical innovation. Our teams continue to harness the power of the community through open-source projects like Open Compute, React, PyTorch, and Llama. Nothing is more important to our efforts than the ability to share ideas (and code!) that galvanize people across
the industry to break through obstacles together and achieve the next set of advancements. However, communicating complex technical concepts is still a daunting task for many. I regularly listen to talks that share a lot of details without explaining why they matter and to whom, how one could contribute, and what can change by paying heed to the speaker. Buggy presentations cause outages and leave audiences in the dark.

This is where Luminary steps on the scene. As Jack shares in this book, our brains have evolved over thousands of years to gravitate toward stories that evoke intellectual connections and emotional responses, both of which are crucial to the success of technical communications. Storytelling is a mechanism for organizing information that would otherwise be perceived by our audience as random. Like all good stories, our technical content has characters—people who build with us, people who build on what we built, and people who use what was built. There are plots that surround our key characters—the challenges we faced and the solutions we used to overcome them. Without a way to tell these stories, it’s hard for our ideas to catch on. This applies not just to large conference talks but also to pitching ideas in team meetings and discussing performance in one-to-ones with managers.

My passion for storytelling grew when I met and worked with Jack in 2019 to prepare a keynote talk for an @Scale conference. Over the years, I’ve seen him develop and ship many impactful stories, from app performance to backbone networking and other deeply technical topics across the stack. There have been a few aha moments from his work with our various teams, but one in particular stands out as a game changer. We wanted to share how Distributed Systems innovation is key to Large Language Model development and the progress of Generative AI. At first, we struggled to develop a cohesive narrative. After workshopping several ideas we crafted a compelling story around a simple yet profound message: “AI is influencing Systems, while Systems are influencing AI.” I’m excited to see Jack bring his expertise to everyone through this book. Whether you’re looking to increase the perceived value of your work, rally support for it, or simply improve your public speaking skills, Luminary is an invaluable guide. The journey toward mastery of technical storytelling has been transformative. I hope you get as much value from it as I have.