Performance comparison of video coding standards: an adaptive streaming perspective

“This is my advice to people: Learn how to cook, try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun” — Julia Child (American chef, author, and television personality) At Netflix, we are continually refining the recipes we use to serve your favorite shows and movies…

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…

Bundling C library in Swift framework

In 2014 Apple introduced Swift, a new language for developing applications across its ecosystem. As well as offering various new possibilities and features, it also created some new challenges for those wanting to use good old C libraries. In this article, I will describe one common use case which you…

Modernizing the Web Playback UI

Since 2013, the user experience of playing videos on the Netflix website has changed very little. During this period, teams at Netflix have rolled out amazing video playback features, but the visual design and user controls of the playback UI have remained the same. The visual design and user controls…

Building Services at Airbnb Part 3

By: Weibo He, Liang Guo A bright and spacious Airbnb Plus listing in London Airbnb is moving its infrastructure towards a service-oriented architecture. A reliable, performant, and developer-friendly polyglot service platform is an underpinning component in Airbnb’s architectural evolution. In Part 1 and Part 2 of our Building Services series, we shared how we used Thrift service IDL-centered service…

How Airbnb is Boosting Data Literacy With ‘Data U Intensive’ Training

Since we introduced Airbnb’s Data University, the program has continued to thrive and evolve. One improvement has been the addition of team-specific trainings with content tailored to the work of that team. In this post, we describe the impact of this addition and the lessons learned in its implementation. What is Data University? …

Activity Grouping: The Heart of a Social Network for Athletes

Our learnings from adopting GraphQL

by Artem Shtatnov and Ravi Srinivas Ranganathan In an earlier blog post, we provided a high-level overview of some of the applications in the Marketing Technology team that we build to enable scale and intelligence in driving our global advertising, which reaches users on sites like The New York Times…

How we load tested our APIs in Production

Grofers’ microservices based infrastructure currently handles around 400K Daily Active Users(DAU). One of the goals of the engineering team this quarter is to make sure our servers are robust enough to handle load at 2.5X of this number i.e. 1 million DAUs. Both availability and performance of our APIs are…

Generating multi-brand multi-platform icons with Sketch and a Node.js script

This is the second part of a post about the creation of a pipeline that can take a Sketch file and export all the icons included in the file, in different formats, for different platforms, with the possibility of AB testing each icon. You can read the first part of…

Open sourcing node-publisher

The dependency graph of our hypothetical package “A” We’ve just fixed an annoying bug in dependency C and our task is to propagate the fix up until package A. So…

Generating multi-brand multi-platform icons with Sketch and a Node.js script

TL;DR Using a custom build script in Node JS, it is possible to manipulate a series of Sketch files, and then, using an internal Sketch tool, automatically export their assets, to generate multiple icon libraries, for multiple platforms and different brands, that support dynamic colourisation of the assets via design tokens…

How Airbnb is Moving 10x Faster at Scale with GraphQL and Apollo

I had the opportunity to kick off GraphQL Summit last month with a talk that involved quite a bit of live coding (the Keynote intro ends at minute 6:00 if you’re in a hurry!). Check it out: From the feedback I gathered over the following days of the conference…

Cache warming: Agility for a stateful service

EVCache has been a fundamental part of the Netflix platform (we call it Tier-1), holding Petabytes of data. Our caching layer serves multiple use cases from signup, personalization, searching, playback, and more. It is comprised of thousands of nodes in…

PHP code static analysis based on the example of PHPStan, Phan and Psalm

As a company Badoo has been around for over 12 years now. We have a lot of PHP code (millions of lines of code) and there are probably still strings of code that we use which were written all 12 years ago. Some of them were written back in the…

40,000 FREE Slices of Cheesecake Factory Cheesecake with DoorDash

What: Have your cake (and eat it, too) with one free slice of Cheesecake Factory cheesecake per customer. No delivery fees, service fees or subtotal minimum required…this means you don’t have to order anything and can still get your slice of cheesecake for free. When: On December 5 starting at 11:30 am local time while supplies last. How: Open up the DoorDash app on your mobile phone or desktop and add one slice of your favorite Cheesecake Factory cheesecake flavor to your cart. Use promo code FREESLICE at checkout and your cheesecake will be on its way. Where: Get yourself a free slice of cheesecake via the DoorDash website or app from all participating Cheesecake Factory locations nationwide. That’s not all. To continue the celebration please enjoy no delivery fees for the rest of the week when ordering from The Cheesecake Factory. Hurry — these slices will go fast!

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…

How Pinterest runs Kafka at scale

Pinterest runs one of the largest Kafka deployments in the cloud. We use Apache Kafka extensively as a message bus to transport data and to power real-time streaming services, ultimately helping more than 250 million Pinners around the world discover and do what…

Black FryDay means FREE fries

Long lines? Hangry kiddos? Not exactly relaxing. Don’t get fried on Black Friday — get fries. As in, a FREE order of fries. That’s right, Black FRYday is here and we’re pretty sure it’s gonna be your new favorite holiday. Starting at 6am until 11:59pm PST on Nov. 23, enjoy…

Optical alignment for frontend developers:

How to align elements in user interfaces. Hi, my name is Ivan Grekov and I work in the front-end team at Badoo. My primary responsibilities entail looking after the user interfaces for a variety of projects. More specifically, this involves working with optical alignment of user interfaces. In this article, I’d like to share with you why…

Scaling Spark Streaming for Logging Event Ingestion

by Hao Wang and Liyin Tang Walking over a stream during an Airbnb Experience in Kuala Lumpur. Searching, viewing, and booking… Logging Event Ingestion at Airbnb Logging events are emitted from clients (such as mobile apps and web browser) and online services with key information and context about the actions or operations. Each event carries a specific piece of information. For example, when a guest searches for a beach house…

Celebrating Women in Computing at Grace Hopper 2018

Real-time contextual type-ahead suggestions

Chapter I: The Motivation TL;DR We want to provide smart type-ahead suggestions, based on short-term user activity context. We aim to reduce the friction of finding the right product for a shopper at Myntra. Our Contextual Type-Ahead in Progress. Elucidation: Here we glance over regular suggestions, set Cushion Covers as the context and then…

Friendsgiving: All About Dessert

Molly Yeh, food blogger and host of the Food Network’s Girl Meets Farm…

DoorDash’s Friendsgiving with Molly Yeh and Sam Talbot