Pinterest + ktlint = ❤

Ha pasado casi un año desde que la base de código Android de Pinterest se convirtió en la prioridad de Kotlin, y aproximadamente dos años desde que adoptamos ktlint para el formato y lint de Kotlin. Hoy, compartimos que Pinterest se…

Building a dynamic and responsive Pinterest

In 2015, the majority of content on Pinterest was pregenerated for users prior to login. It was stored statically in HBase and served directly upon entering the service. (More details can be found in the blog post Building a smarter home feed.) …

The Dead Code Society

On June 1, 2018, engineer Chris Lloyd created the #dead-code-society Slack channel to be “a sombre place for remembering [---]-only diffs.” Messages are prefixed by a :tombstone: and include links to diffs that contain only file or line deletions. The channel averages a little over one message per day, but they frequently come in bursts as part of refactoring projects and clean-up efforts. As Pinterest has grown as a company, our software unpinning has grown with it. We have hundreds of software engineers producing thousands of changes per week. The net result is an upward trend in total lines of code with a significant portion of our software having been (re)written in just the last few years. The #dead-code-society has helped balance that trend by celebrating the retirement of code from active service. Retired code remains in source control history to be remembered and consulted, but it no longer occupies a prominent place in our workspaces, build systems, or cognitive periphery. Less is more. Carpe diem.

Improving HBase backup efficiency at Pinterest

Pinterest has one of the largest HBase production deployments in the industry. HBase is one of the foundational building blocks of our infrastructure and powers many of our critical services including our graph database (Zen), our general-purpose key-value store (UMS), our…

Empowering Pinterest data scientists and machine learning engineers with PySpark

Data scientists and machine learning engineers at Pinterest found themselves hitting major challenges with existing tools. Hive and Presto were readily accessible tools for large scale data transformations, but complex logic…

How Pinterest Fights Spam Using Machine Learning

Hundreds of millions of people regularly visit Pinterest to visually discover inspiring ideas among billions of Pins. Inspiration is a high bar and we must be vigilant in ensuring that Pinners don’t see spam, harmful content or misinformation. To enforce our…

How Pinterest fights misinformation, hate speech, and self-harm content with machine learning

Pinterest is an inspiration network where people come for positivity and new ideas, and there’s nothing inspiring about harmful content. As a visual discovery engine with hundreds of billions of Pins…

Understanding product attributes for shoppers

Every day, people come to Pinterest to shop and find ideas in categories like home and fashion, and it’s our responsibility to show them the most relevant and inspiring products. We measure relevance in a few different dimensions, but most importantly…

How we reduced Pinterest’s iOS app size by 30+% / 50MB

We all know app size (download size[1] and local install size[2]) matters, and there is a correlation between app size and customer engagement. Many times, people make decisions about using software based on size, and even pay for bandwidth by the megabyte. Not…

People Behind the Product: Meet Rahim Daya, Head of International Product & Toronto Lead

Rahim Daya, Toronto-native and Pinployee of nearly 4 years, leads Pinterest’s International Product as well as the Tech team in Toronto. Ahead of our virtual Pinterest Engineering: Meet the Toronto Team event, get to know Rahim and learn more about…

Cómo redujimos el tamaño de la aplicación de Pinterest para iOS en más de un 30% / 50 MB

This blog was originally published in English. To read the English version, click here. Todos sabemos que el tamaño de las aplicaciones es importante (el tamaño de descarga[1] y el tamaño de instalación local[2]). Además, existe una correlación…

Pinterest + ktlint = ❤

It’s been nearly a year since Pinterest’s Android codebase became Kotlin-first, and about two years since we adopted ktlint for Kotlin linting and formatting. Today, we’re sharing that Pinterest has officially taken ownership over the project. Initially, we chose ktlint because of its…

Building Pin stats

A few months back, we started building a way for businesses to create and showcase their latest and favorite content on their profiles. We also wanted to make it easier for businesses to understand how their Pins are performing. If a business can…

Building a universal search system for Pinterest

On Pinterest, the best answer goes beyond text, but can even go beyond an image too. When you’re looking for eye makeup ideas for example, a video personalized to your skin tone range teaching you how to create a certain look is likely…

Scaling Kubernetes with Assurance at Pinterest

Introduction It has been more than a year since we shared our Kubernetes Journey at Pinterest. Since then, we have delivered many features to facilitate customer adoption, ensure reliability and scalability, and build up operational experience and best practices. In general, Kubernetes platform users gave…

Launching your career as an apprentice engineer at Pinterest

In 2018, after more than a decade focused on environmental sustainability, I decided to start a new career as a software engineer. I enrolled in an immersive software development course in NYC, and a year later I was headed to a software engineering apprenticeship…

PinnerSage: Multi-Modal User Embedding Framework for Recommendations at Pinterest

As we build a visual discovery engine that powers 2B+ Pins, it’s crucial to understand user interests and preferences in…

Faster Creator Content Distribution at Pinterest

At Pinterest, we are committed to building the best experience for creators to reach and inspire new audiences and for Pinners to easily discover the best ideas for them. We believe more diverse Pin formats and an efficient distribution system that builds a…

Keeping Related Pins fresh

If you’ve ever heard someone mention “the Pinterest Rabbit Hole,” they’re likely referring to Related Pins, the ideas you see below a Pin you’ve tapped. Related Pins is a feed of content relevant to the closeup Pin and accounts for 40 percent of engagement…

How We Protect Pinners’ Passwords

Aalaa Satti | Software Engineer Amine Kamel | Head of Production Security At Pinterest, one method by which we ensure account security is through protecting Pinners’ passwords. Passwords can be problematic for a variety of reasons, including the fact that people tend to reuse their…

Looking inside the technology that powers Pinterest

Pinterest began as a small startup, and has grown to a company that serves +175B Pins to +250M people. While we have one of the largest datasets online, we have 600+ engineers, and so technology needs to be accessible for each person to play their part in…

Virtual onboarding in the time of COVID-19: The new hire’s new normal

Cindy Xinyi Zhang | Data Scientist, Experimentation and Metrics Science On March 2nd, exactly one week before my full-time position at Pinterest started…

How Pinterest runs Kafka at scale

Pinterest runs one of the largest Kafka deployments in the cloud. We use Apache Kafka extensively as a message bus to transport data and to power real-time streaming services, ultimately helping more than 250 million Pinners around the world discover and do what…

Contextual relevance in ads ranking

Pinterest runs an ads marketplace that balances value for Pinners, partners, and the business. We initially used engagement prediction as our main method to balance the marketplace before eventually adding contextual relevance to increase Pinner value. We have three main surfaces for determining…

Understanding the product cycle of discovery to purchase on Pinterest

Pinners have always used Pinterest for shopping, as they often come in a planning mindset and are exploring products and…