Scala Practices that Powered Streak Challenges

This summer, I helped implement streak challenges at Strava by working on the new challenges infrastructure as an intern on the API team. This entailed implementing and deploying two new Scala services, which introduced me to several cool things like Scala, how Kafka works and how to deploy a Docker…

PinalyticsDB: A Time Series Database on top of Hbase

PinalyticsDB is Pinterest’s proprietary time series database. At Pinterest, we rely on PinalyticsDB as a backend for storing and visualizing thousands of time series reports such as the sample case below, segmented by country. PinalyticsDB was built several years ago on…

Throwback to Deezer ConTEST: the first hackathon for Product and QA

Deezer has a long tradition of hosting and organizing tech events such as internal or external hackathons, meetups, and more. Our motivation is to offer our people learning experiences by connecting them to external communities. Deezer ConTest was about encouraging our QA and…

Scaling a Mature Data Pipeline — Managing Overhead

Author: Zachary Ennenga The view from the third floor at Airbnb HQ! Background There is often a natural evolution in the tooling, organization, and technical underpinning of data pipelines. Most data teams and data pipelines are born from a monolithic collection of queries. As the pipeline grows in its complexity, it becomes sensible to leverage the Java or Python Spark…

Evolving Regional Evacuation

At Netflix we prioritize innovation and velocity in pursuit of the best experience for our 150+ million global customers. This means that our microservices constantly evolve and change, but what doesn’t change is our responsibility to provide a highly available service that delivers 100+ million hours of daily streaming to…

A Comprehensive Guide To Deploying A Website In Kubernetes

Recently, we at Grofers took a decision to migrate all our services to Kubernetes. Now during the process of migrating our frontend website to Kubernetes, we realised that the default Rolling Update deployment strategy doesn’t work that well and we had to shift to Blue Green strategy instead (we’ll go…

Managing Videos on Android

Video launched on the Pinterest Android app in 2016 with the goal of bringing a seamless video experience to the app. This included the ability to support multiple videos per screen, while dynamically controlling their playback state by automatically pausing them when they’ve scrolled…

Implementing Beacon on Apple Watch

Beacon — a Summit feature that allows athletes to send a live update of their location to safety contacts. Back in late April, I started implementing Beacon on the Apple Watch. Aside from UI work, adding Beacon support to our Watch app consisted of two parts. The first part was…

White Box Testing With Appium Espresso Driver

At Badoo, we have techies who strongly believe in contributing to the open source community. This article is about how I contributed a very useful feature called ‘backdoor’ to Appium which solves lots of problems related to Android UI automation. There are a few examples of it in this article…

Join Us In Fighting Hunger This Hunger Action Month

In honor of Feeding America’s Hunger Action Month–a month where people all over America stand…

#DunzoChronicles — Bengaluru Oota Company

How Pune decided to get smart

Reimagining Experimentation Analysis at Netflix

Another day, another custom script to analyze an A/B test. Maybe you’ve done this before and have an old script lying around. If it’s new, it’s probably going to take some time to set up, right? Not at Netflix. ABlaze: The standard view…

Android Launch Performance

As an athlete, two ways to improve performance are building strength or improving efficiency. If you train consistently, you start to see improvements. The path to improving software performance has some similarities like how you might see steady improvements over time, only to reach a temporary plateau before breaking through…

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…

Now Dashing Down Under

Today we announced our official launch in Melbourne, Australia. While we’ve spent the last six years building our business in North America, we are excited by the opportunity to extend our vision to a brand new continent for the first time and connect the incredible restaurants, Dashers…

5 Questions With DoorDash’s New Vice President of Communications, Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean

We’re excited to welcome Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean (AKA Liz or EJS) to our Management Team, a seasoned communications and public affairs professional who recently joined us as VP of Communications. Liz has spent the past decade leading communications and public affairs for high-impact and global tech startups including Tesla, Nuna Inc…

My first job as a Web Engineer, from doubt to fulfillment

This is what you’ll typically find in the ‘requirements’ section of a tech job vacancy: “Has strong knowledge in several languages, is “full-stack”, is able to create strong architecture, scalable and flexible, has experience in understanding large and complex code bases, must be proactive and organized, has a great team…

Working to Strike a Better Balance

Today, we’re sharing more details about the changes we’re making to how earnings and tipping will work on DoorDash — changes that we believe will allow DoorDash to better serve both Dashers and customers. We developed this approach with input from customers and Dashers, including members of our Dasher Community…

Applying Netflix DevOps Patterns to Windows

By Justin Phelps and Manuel Correa Customizing Windows images at Netflix was a manual, error-prone, and time consuming process. In this blog post, we describe how we improved the methodology, which technologies we leveraged, and how this has improved service deployment and consistency. Artisan Crafted Images In the Netflix…

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…

Celebrating National Potato Day

Here’s…

Reverse Image Search with Machine Learning

Demo app from commercetools using the Image Search API. The Machine Learning team at commercetools is excited to release the beta version of our new Image Search API. Image search (sometimes called reverse image search) is a tool, where given an image as a query, a duplicate or similar image…

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…

Adventures in big data wonderland: Going down the Pinterest Path

Have you ever started looking for plants on Pinterest, only to end up shopping for pillows instead? Ever find yourself layers of Pins deep into finding a new idea, not sure of how you got there or where you started? When Pinners are in…