#HereForPride

It’s Pride Month, and if the events that have transpired across the world this year have taught us anything, it is the importance of shedding prejudices and practicing harmonious coexistence. On this occasion, to encourage greater tolerance towards, and a better understanding of the issues affecting the LGBTQIA+ community…

Update on Dasher & Courier Safety

We are deeply disturbed by the treatment of a Caviar Courier who was arrested last night while performing essential work in New York City, and we are relieved that he was released. We are in contact with the Courier and have offered our support. The health and safety of our community is a priority and we will continue to offer legal, financial, medical, and mental health support to Dashers and Couriers if they are wrongly arrested for violating the curfew in connection with their work on our app. We remain committed to protecting Dashers and Couriers who continue to serve on the frontlines and are authorized to access critical earnings opportunities on our platform while providing food to those in need. We have been in active conversations with officials in New York City and beyond to help ensure Dashers and Couriers can continue to perform deliveries and travel to and from work under the current local laws without fear of being harassed, detained, or arrested. We will continue to actively monitor the situation at a city level and provide real-time information to Dashers and Couriers to alert them where we are suspending operations in response to local curfews or to protect their safety.

Leading Machine Learning at Zendesk

I recently participated in an interview series covering careers in emerging technology fields on the French website TOM.travel. I’ve been leading machine learning at Zendesk for the last 6 years and over that time we’ve grown from two people in Melbourne to tens of people on three continents. I discussed…

A Github Actions Workflow to Generate & Publish your Hugo Website

This short post describes a Github Actions workflow to generate your Hugo-based website and publish it to Github Pages. To learn more about Hugo and GitHub Pages, and how to use them to build your website, see my previous post. What is Github Actions Github Actions is a service from Github which allows you…

In search of speed — debugging Elasticsearch performance

Background Here at Prezi, we use Elasticsearch to power the Explore pages for both Prezi Presentations and Prezi Videos. At the start of this year, we started running into performance issues with our cluster. Queries would take too long, some would timeout, resulting in 500 errors, high latency, degraded user experience…

Standing Together for Justice

Like many of you, I read about the inhumane murder of George Floyd and Amy Cooper’s abuse of privilege last week. With this latest injustice coming on the heels of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and so many others over the years, my emotions have ranged from anger…

Announcing “Main Street Strong”: Our Commitment to Helping Restaurants On the Road to Recovery

Validating Cloud Custodian on AWS with Moto

At Zendesk, we adopted Cloud Custodian as a framework to implement compliance across our AWS accounts. Cloud Custodian has a Domain Specific Language that allows anyone with a penchant for reading documentation to create policies that can report or act on resources in AWS, GCP, or Azure. Deleting or re-configuring…

Keeping Customers Streaming — The Centralized Site Reliability Practice at Netflix

We’re privileged to be in the business of bringing joy to our customers at Netflix. Whether it’s a compelling new series or an innovative product feature, we strive to provide a best-in-class service that people love and can enjoy anytime, anywhere…

7 Questions With DoorDash’s New Chief Revenue Officer, Tom Pickett

As DoorDash expands into different products and geographies, we couldn’t be…

Adopting Changesets for release and changelog automation

When working on Open Source Software (OSS), documentation is a crucial part of the project. It helps to ease adoption by providing in-depth descriptions on how to get started, how to use advanced functionalities, to communicate best practices with examples, and so on. However, documentation does not end with an…

Introducing an improved Deezer experience on Xbox: access your favorite songs directly while…

A little context The Xbox Guide By pressing the Xbox button on your controller, you access the Xbox Guide. This is…

Hyper Scale VPC Flow Logs enrichment to provide Network Insight

The Cloud Network Infrastructure that Netflix utilizes today is a large distributed ecosystem that consists of specialized functional tiers and services such as DirectConnect, VPC Peering, Transit Gateways, NAT Gateways, etc. While we strive to keep the ecosystem simple, the inherent nature of leveraging…

#DunzoChronicles — mAsk Around

The Airbnb Talent Directory

The past few months have been hard for all of us, but it has been inspiring to see everyone, especially the Airbnb community, support each other during an unprecedented time. Our CEO, Brian Chesky, recently announced the departure of nearly 1,900 employees. Among these employees are incredibly talented Engineers and Data Scientists who have contributed to Airbnb in uncountable ways. To support our teammates departing Airbnb, we launched the Alumni Talent Directory, an opt-in directory which lists valued employees and contingent workers who have recently departed Airbnb. If you’re currently hiring or looking for incredible talent, the Talent Directory is full of amazing Engineers and Data Scientists, among others. We hope we can connect these individuals with new opportunities. It’s been an honor to work with such a talented team committed to our mission of belonging, and we’re confident any company would be lucky to have them. We’d also like to thank the cross-functional team that created the site in an extremely short period of time. We are all grateful for their hard work: Chris Arrington, Gina Groom, Noor Malik, Derek Southard, Parag Hardas, Robin Foyle, Mike Fowler, Christian Williams, Megan Gebhart, Alex Cheng, Steve Rafferty, Sonia Yang, Andy Tran, Angela Wu, Linsey Jackson, James Deslonde, Kelly Coldwell, as well as Joe Gebbia for inspiring the idea. Airbnb Alumni Talent Directory

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…

How many people does it take to change a light bulb?

aka API-Centric Development in Non-API Company (Based on a talk by Konstantin Yakushev @ Nordics APIs) The answer is 24, one to hold the light bulb and … Okay, it’s a bad joke, but the number is right and I’ll explain it why later. Today’s topic is how we ended up developing an API-Centric Development environment…

Easy steps to get OBS running for high-quality demo and presentation recordings

Earlier this year, the product team started conducting internal product update demos. Every other month, we would showcase the changes and new features from across the product team to the entire company. This would help keep everyone on top of the latest developments while giving them the opportunity to ask…

Part 2: Deep Learning for Engineers

Introduction to Transfer Learning In this article, we use the concepts we saw in part 1 article to unleash the power of neural networks and the reason for their current popularity, namely their reusability. We learn how we can (partially) automate the feature engineering part and how this opens a new world of possibilities…

Part 1: Deep Learning for Engineers

Introduction Deep learning has become one of the most discussed topics in the Data Science community. It has long made sense for the Bumble team — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — to use deep learning on a multitude of tasks. With over millions of users around the…

Keeping You And Our Partners Safe

When it matters the most With home deliveries playing an integral role in us maintaining social distancing, we had to ensure the safety of our delivery partners who are now the lifelines of our society. Keeping this in mind we had to take some precautionary measures, starting with sending out clear communications to our partners and merchants around social distancing and hygiene. Here are some of the step we had adopted to ensure that our deliveries are safe: Protective gear for our partners Masks and gloves have been provided to our delivery partners for their safety. Sanitizers at key locations We identified key merchant locations and provided stations with hand sanitizers for our partners to use. Temperature checks to ensure safety Our delivery partners take regular temperature checks and are advised to maintain social distancing. No contact delivery To ensure the safety of our users and partners, we have no contact delivery as an option. Encouraging the use of Aarogya Setu app Partners have been asked to download the Aarogya Setu app, the contact-tracing app built by the Indian government, to help them assess their risk of catching the Coronavirus, on the basis of user’s interactions with others, using Bluetooth technology. Maybe you like to read a book or maybe you like to dance while you cook, the best that we can all do is to stay indoors and stay safe. It may not be easy, but if you feel there’s something we could do to make it a little easier to get through these times, you can always count on your friendly neighbourhood delivery app. Stay in. Stay safe!

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…

Application localisation:

Hello! I’m Alexey Timin, a Senior Software Engineer at Bumble, in charge of localisation system development. Let me tell you more about our localisation system. We work on two products: Badoo and Bumble and operate more than 150,000 phrases and texts, translated into more than 50 languages. Each project has…

Client-side neural networks

Historical background The popularity of machine learning and neural networks is growing every day, and faster than we could ever have imagined. Many industry players are contributing, and client-side frameworks are developing rapidly. Many libraries, such as TensorFlow, are constantly releasing new versions. More mobile devices are now receiving hardware support for…

Detecting explicit content in songs

We’ve done some research about how to automatically detect explicit content in songs using only the music itself, and no additional metadata. Since it’s a sensitive and subjective issue, we did not want to use a black-box model, but rather build a modular system whose decisions can be traced back…