Rebuilding Instagram in 2026

Instagram was originally built on Django and Python, and despite being acquired by Facebook, it never rewrote its core stack. The article highlights the challenges of serving the right image to the right device, which is still a difficult task. This is relevant to engineers building image-heavy applications, as they must consider factors like image quality, compression, and device-specific rendering. To address this, engineers should consider using a robust framework like Django and custom data layers for likes and media.