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…

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…

Improving data processing efficiency using partial deserialization of Thrift

At Pinterest we’ve worked to greatly improve data processing efficiency. One quote that resonates with our unique approach is from writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Ultimately…

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…

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.

Real-time User Signal Serving for Feature Engineering

More than 320 million unique visitors come to Pinterest every month to discover inspiring content, which also gives advertisers a unique opportunity to get their products in front of people with commercial intent. Curation…

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…

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…

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…

An update on Pixie, Pinterest’s recommendation system

We recently welcomed engineers to our offices for our annual Mad Science Fair, where I shared the latest on Pixie, an advanced graph-based recommendation system. Here’s a recap of that talk, and you can find the video here. As Pinterest grows to more…

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…

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…

Setting Up Snowflake Secondary Roles with Tableau

At Pinterest, we heavily utilize Tableau for our enterprise analytics. In an effort to secure access of sensitive data to the appropriate business units, we moved the enterprise data into a Snowflake data warehouse. Using Snowflake as a data platform, we can create and manage…

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…

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…

Geo-blocking media content on Pinterest

Pinterest engineers are tasked with showing Pinners the best ideas related to their interests, which includes taking into account signals like location. As part of these efforts, we built a video and image platform to enable a…

Goku: Building a scalable and high performant time series database system

Co-authored by Jinghan Xu, Jian Wang & Tian-Ying Chang, Engineers At Pinterest, developers rely on Statsboard to monitor their systems and discover issues. A reliable and efficient monitoring system is very important for development velocity. Historically, we’ve used OpenTSDB to ingest and…

Building a Label-Based Enforcement Pipeline for Trust & Safety

As Pinterest grows with increasing numbers of users and businesses, providing a safe and trustworthy experience is one of our top priorities. Every day the platform serves billions of Pins and boards to inspire Pinners. With so many Pins and activity, It can…

Building board archiving and sorting

Connor Montgomery | Software engineer, Product Engineering A Pinterest tradition we’ve had since our early days is the Make-a-thon, our twist on a hackathon. Make-a-thons bring together employees from different disciplines to build something new. In the past, we’ve had projects range from scaling hacks to AR prototypes to…

How we built rearranging Pins

Listening to user feedback is essential to building a product Pinners love and use to discover and save ideas every day. Often, their feature requests present interesting technical challenges for our engineers. For example, today we launched the ability to…

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…

Pin2Interest: A scalable system for content classification

Content understanding is at the core of any great recommendation system. By knowing what each Pin is about, Pinterest can connect Pinners with the most relevant and inspiring content that best matches their interests. Taxonomy of interests The Interest Taxonomy captures popular concepts that appear within Pinterest…

Seven best practices for inclusive product design

At Pinterest, our mission is to help you discover and do what you love. We’re building a product for everyone, because the best Pinterest is inclusive and easily usable for people with all levels of abilities. That’s why today we’re sharing our…

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…

User state-based notification volume optimization

Notifications play an important role in helping Pinterest’s 335M+ monthly active users discover and engage with inspiring content. It’s crucial to send the right number of notifications with high quality content. If we send too few notifications, Pinners might miss out on great opportunities…