Improving the Quality of Recommended Pins with Lightweight Ranking

The Pinterest corpus is composed of billions of Pins, however, each Pinner only sees a small subset based on their interests when…

User retention at Pinterest: tackling an ambiguous problem

User retention is an important but nebulous idea. It’s hard to acquire users and even harder to help them feel at home through an engaging and relevant experience. So when some of those users start to leave the platform, your first thought is…

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…

Optimizing Kafka for the cloud

Takeaways Developing locality aware systems and balancing algorithms can help substantially reduce cost Making Kafka Producer and Consumer rack aware helps efficiently route traffic Data-driven engineering decision making is critical to continuously improve systems One of the fundamental principles when operating in the…

Using Kafka to throttle QPS on MySQL shards in bulk write APIs

At Pinterest, backend core services are in charge of various operations on pins, boards, and users from both Pinners and internal services. While Pinners’ operations are identified as online traffic because of real-time response, internal traffic is identified as offline because processing is…

Powering Pinterest ads analytics with Apache Druid

The Change When we launched Promoted Pins in 2014, we chose Apache HBase as our database to store and serve all of our reporting metrics. At the beginning of our ads business, this was an appropriate choice because…

PinText: A Multitask Text Embedding System in Pinterest

Word embeddings have been actively studied and developed by researchers and practitioners in the machine learning community since the neural network language model was proposed. Researchers not only proposed principled algorithms and open-source code, but they also released pre-trained embedding models with public…

The Fantastic Fixathon

Engineers at Pinterest are always focused on doing what’s best for the product, but working in a codebase that’s clean, well-maintained, and relatively bug-free transforms engineering tasks from being “just work” to enjoyable opportunities to flex our skills. We’re also enriched as engineers, both technically and otherwise, when we take…

Using graph algorithms to optimize Kafka operations, Part 1

Pinterest uses Kafka across the board for data movement. The Logging Platform team alone manages over 3,000 Kafka brokers transporting trillions of messages per day to help bring more than 320 million monthly active Pinners the inspiration to create a life they love. …

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…

Building Expanded Targeting for Pinterest Ads

With more than 300 million people coming to Pinterest each month, Pinterest offers unique opportunities for advertisers to get their products in front of people with commercial intent. Similar to other platforms, Pinterest offers a variety of advertising targeting products¹. Advertisers can…

Building interactive email with AMP

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open source technology created by Google to support fast mobile web pages. Over the years, we’ve partnered with Google and adopted AMP technology in our mobile web pages to deliver a faster, more efficient user experience. Most…

Interest Taxonomy: A knowledge graph management system for content understanding at Pinterest

Interest Taxonomy at Pinterest We recently began rolling out the beta version of Pinterest Trends, a new tool that gives a view of the top U.S. search terms on Pinterest within the past 12 months, and a look into when search terms peak for…

One year in at Pinterest and looking ahead as we grow

A little over a year ago, I joined Pinterest as the SVP of Technology. The world looks different than I thought it would around my first “Pinniversary”, but the opportunities before us are more apparent and abundant than ever before. For me personally, I’m…

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…

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.

Using machine learning to auto-organize boards

While planning one’s life might look different these days, our insights tell us people are saving ideas for the future more than ever. Last month, for instance, Pinterest had a 60% increase in the number…

Upgrading Pinterest operational metrics

Recently, Pinterest hit a major milestone: 300 million monthly active users around the world. To reliably serve this user base with our large content corpus, Pinterest’s engineering team maintains thousands of services all working together in tight…

El fantástico Fixathon

Los ingenieros de Pinterest siempre están enfocados en hacer lo mejor para el producto, pero trabajar en una base de código limpia, con buen mantenimiento y relativamente libre de errores transforma las tareas de ingeniería de ser “solo trabajo” a oportunidades agradables para…

Three-day no-meeting schedule for engineers

About 100 days ago, our product engineering team began experimenting with a three-day no-meeting schedule for individual contributors on our teams. It’s not a big revelation that software development requires long stretches of uninterrupted time to focus. As Pinterest has grown…

Bottoms-Up: How the Pinterest growth team decentralizes team structure

On the growth team at Pinterest, we describe our structure as “bottoms-up”, meaning ideas and responsibilities flow throughout the team in a way that provides a lot of autonomy to work on the projects each person wants to tackle, across a variety of roles. The…

Refactoring Thrift schemas at Pinterest

The Pinterest tech stack consists of hundreds of microservices written in a variety of languages that use Apache Thrift to communicate with each other. Thrift schemas are used to define our service interfaces, constants and serialized data across all levels of the stack…

Ad Metrics Quality and Testing on Mobile

Every day at Pinterest, we help our advertising partners reach Pinners through different ad formats, and we provide them with metrics and analytics on how their ads are performing. Maintaining our partners’ trust and delivering value is critical, so the metrics we expose…

Administrar videos en Android

La función de video se lanzó en la aplicación de Pinterest para Android en 2016 a fin de ofrecer una experiencia de video completamente integrada en la aplicación. Esto incluía la capacidad de admitir varios videos por pantalla…

Building Pin cohesion

At Pinterest, we’re building a visual discovery engine where ideas become actionable with links to more information. Once a Pin is saved, its linked content may be updated or expire over time, and so it’s critical to know…