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…

A one year PWA retrospective

The idea of building a “Progressive Web App” (PWA) is not new, but its definition has changed with the emergence of key technologies like service workers. Now it’s finally possible to build great experiences in a mobile browser. Being an early adopter can…

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…

Using PID controllers to diversify content types on home feed

Every day millions of Pinners visit the home feed to find inspiration on Pinterest. As a member of the home feed ranking team, it’s my job to not only figure out what relevant pins to show Pinners but also to make sure that…

How Pinterest Supercharged its Growth Team With Experiment Idea Review

Growth teams need to be organized bottom-up to scale well The Pinterest Growth team has over 100 members, and we’ve run thousands of experiments over the years. It’s difficult to run that many experiments and still maintain a high success rate over time. We’ve found the traditional growth team model of team leads…

Partitioning Pinlater for Fun(?) and Profit(!)

Contained within the November 2015 announcement of the open-sourcing of Pinlater, our asynchronous job execution system, was a description of some of the improvements that had been made to the system since the original 2014 blog post describing its creation. Notable among…

Pre-Submit Integration Tests For Ads-Serving

Introduction & Background The ads-serving platform is the highest-scale, highest-complexity, and highest-velocity recommendation service at Pinterest. Our ads business is growing and expanding, and the ads engineering team is iterating quickly to continue to improve the system. Therefore, it is vital to keep the system healthy, in order…

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…

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…

Unifying visual embeddings for visual search at Pinterest

Throughout the years, Pinterest has launched a variety of visual search products powered by computer vision to help people discover new ideas to try and products to buy. We started in 2015 with our visual cropping tool, allowing users to search within…

Pinterest Flink Deployment Framework

Background At Pinterest, stream processing allows us to unlock value from real time data for pinners and partners. The Stream Processing Platform team is working on building a reliable and scalable platform to support many critical streaming applications including real-time experiment analytics…

Building a more inclusive way to search

Every day, tens of millions of people search for ideas on Pinterest, whether it’s a recipe to cook for dinner that night or a new hairstyle to try over the weekend. According to a Pinterest study, 70 percent of people use Pinterest to…

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…

Fighting spam with Guardian, a real-time analytics and rules engine

As the Trust & Safety team, one of our major responsibilities is protecting Pinners from spam. Without protections, spam could potentially be all over Pinterest since spammers can script and generate activity at a rate much higher than actual users. One of…

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…

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…

Calidad y pruebas de las métricas publicitarias en dispositivos móviles

En Pinterest, todos los días ayudamos a nuestros socios de publicidad a llegar a los usuarios a través de diferentes formatos de anuncios y les ofrecemos métricas y análisis sobre el rendimiento de sus anuncios. Mantener la confianza…

GokuL: Extending time series data storage to serve beyond one day

At Pinterest, developers rely heavily on Statsboard to monitor their systems and get alerted when issues happen. Last year, we introduced our time series database (aka Goku) which stores and serves the most recent one day’s…

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…

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…

How we increased engagement using automatic personalized copy testing

Think about the last time you visited a website. Was there a word that helped draw you in? Now think about how that might be different if you spoke a different language, were a different age or grew up in a different part of…

Supporting React Native at Pinterest

Early last year, a small group of engineers started investigating the possibility of adopting React Native at Pinterest. We’ve been following the ecosystem with interest since it was first open-sourced in 2015. Since then, a robust community has developed around it, and it’s been…

Introducing Pinqueue3.0, Pinterest’s next-gen content moderation platform

In 2016, we reached a milestone of launching Pinqueue2.0, which has since become the go-to content moderation tool for the engineering, community, and data science teams. One of our top priorities at Pinterest is fostering a safe and trustworthy experience for all…

Detecting image similarity using Spark, LSH and TensorFlow

As a visual platform, the ability to learn from images to understand our content is important. In order to detect near-duplicate images we use the NearDup system, a Spark- and TensorFlow-based pipeline. At the core of the pipeline is a Spark implementation of batch…