The Boring Option

Earlier this month the Strava Foundation Engineering team completed a multi-year project to handle the rollover of activity IDs into a 64 bit integer format. This work culminated with a final year-long project to move read and write access of segment effort data from our monolithic Rails app to behind…

WIDeText: A Multimodal Deep Learning Framework

By Wayne Zhang, Mia Zhao, Yuanpei Cao Deep learning (DL) is helping us at Airbnb serve our stakeholders better…

Catching bugs on a client

Our team develops several products, Badoo and Bumble, two of the world’s largest dating and connection applications. For both, we have a web version (desktop and mobile) and mobile applications (Android and iOS). With more than millions of users, it’s important for us to gather client-side errors, and for this…

Data Quality at Airbnb

Authors: Vaughn Quoss, Jonathan Parks, Paul Ellwood Introduction At Airbnb, we’ve always had a data-driven culture. We’ve assembled top-notch data science and engineering teams, built industry-leading data infrastructure, and launched numerous successful open source projects, including Apache Airflow and Apache Superset. Meanwhile, Airbnb has…

Technical Debt, a.k.a. “Not-quite-right-code” at Prezi

The…

How to Fix LLDB: Couldn’t IRGen Expression (when using Carthage)

Timeline Strava’s iOS & watchOS code is stored in a single repository. This repository contains all of our code as well as the compiled Carthage dependencies (Carthage/Build/iOS & Carthage/Build/watchOS). This is partly to reduce complexity for any given engineer (since they don’t need to worry about carthage bootstrap) and to avoid…

A “Krispr” Approach to Kubernetes Infrastructure

Introduction Airbnb is built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In our production infrastructure, we run hundreds of services that do everything from calculating pricing to returning search results to sending messages to users. To unify and scale our infrastructure, we use Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration engine, to define and…

How COVID-19 pushed us to reduce our AWS cost by half

We have been extremely focused on growth before COVID started. AWS is central to how we ship fast that helps fuel that growth. Some of our early mistakes resulted in wastage resulting in high costs over time. COVID-19 pushed us to bring more efficiency in our business operations to provide…

Continuing Our Support of Lottie Open Source Community

After years of working with open source contributors to create new features, fix bugs, and maintain the issue…

Taming Service-Oriented Architecture Using A Data-Oriented Service Mesh

By: Raymie Stata, Arun Vijayvergiya, Adam Miskiewicz At Hasura’s Enterprise GraphQL Conf on October 22, we presented Viaduct, what we’re calling a data-oriented service mesh that we believe will bring a step function improvement in the modularity of our microservices-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). In…

Data Quality at Airbnb

Authors: Jonathan Parks, Vaughn Quoss, Paul Ellwood Introduction At Airbnb, we’ve always had a data-driven culture. We’ve assembled top-notch data science and engineering teams, built industry-leading data infrastructure, and launched numerous successful open source projects, including Apache Airflow and Apache Superset. Meanwhile, Airbnb has transitioned from a startup moving at light…

Learnings From Two Years of Kubernetes in Production

Almost two years back, we took the decision to leave behind our Ansible based configuration management setup for deploying applications on EC2 and move towards containerisation and orchestration of applications using Kubernetes. We have migrated most of our infrastructure to Kubernetes. It was a big undertaking and had its own…

Everything you need to know about #TheStoryGetsBetter -Dunzo’s 3D Animation Short Film —

As Teddy Roosevelt rightly claimed, “The best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing”. #TheStoryGetsBetter — the 3D animation film that we’ve produced in-house, has been exactly that. It’s a labour of love that combines in equal parts — art and heart, skill and soul, hard work and hope. And so, we set out building a story about Auro — a young writer, and his furry little friend — George. For those of you who haven’t yet, do pause here and take a few minutes to watch the film, for the discussions that follow are rife with spoilers. Paying attention to intention Our goal while embarking on the journey of this film was to leave our viewers with an…

Testing JavaScript applications with confidence

It is undeniable that a lot has changed in the last few years in the world of JavaScript. This should not come as a surprise. We are particularly excited to see a lot of progress in the way we write and think about testing in the JavaScript ecosystem. If we…

Building Local Legends

Most Strava athletes love competition! Pushing hard to beat someone in the final stretch of a race. Achieving a new personal best at your local road race. Or perhaps simply pushing yourself to keep up with your training partner in a workout. Athletes crave these things, and it drives them…

Affinity Named One of Fortune’s Best Workplaces for 2020

At Affinity, we know we’re nothing without our employees. That’s why cultivating a workplace environment that supports and strengthens professional relationships is as important to us as any feature of our platform. Even during a tumultuous 2020, as the remote office became the norm, we wanted to foster a culture…

Introduction of View Styles at Bumble

We are the team behind Badoo and Bumble, two of the world’s largest dating and connection applications with millions of users worldwide. To deal with the challenges that arise with such different products we rely on code reusability, and by so avoiding reinventing the wheel we keep our apps stable…

Origins of Data Lake at Grofers

Design by Asif Jamal The Beginning As Data Engineers at the biggest online grocery company in India, one of our major challenges is to democratize data across the organization. But, when we began evaluating how well we were doing on this goal, we realized that frequent errors in our data pipelines had caused our business teams…

7 Simple Ways to Master WFH like a Boss!

The Coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we work…and we at Dunzo think this could be for the better. For those of us privileged to be working from home, we must continue to look at this shift in a positive light and make the most of this opportunity. While the…

Reducing AWS data transfer cost: Kubernetes from Multi-AZ to Single-AZ

The only silver lining for us during COVID-19 was that we got a chance to optimize our resources in our run to cut costs — a long-pending activity. All the teams across the organization were focused on reducing the operating costs as much as possible. Similarly, DevOps teams were mainly…

How Pinterest runs Traffic-based Interlinking experiments for SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an important channel for people to find ideas and inspiration on Pinterest, and can also help expose new users to first use cases, such as hairstyle tutorials or a home office setup. …

Announcing Our Latest Main Street Strong Initiative — Helping Restaurants Prepare for the Winter

This year has been extraordinarily challenging for restaurants. At the beginning of the COVID crisis, dining rooms across the nation closed. Then, as shelter in place orders began to lift, our restaurant partners started to welcome guests back, with many limited to outdoor patios. Now, with winter weather fast approaching…

Introducing DoorDash for Work, Elevating our Product Suite to Power Every Work Meal Occasion

The pandemic has had a profound impact on our daily routines, including the way we eat. Instead of meeting our favorite barista on the way into the office or socializing with our colleagues in the lunch room, we’re spending a lot more time in the kitchen and eating solo at…

Improving Deep Learning for Ranking Stays at Airbnb

Search ranking is at the heart of Airbnb. Data from search logs* indicate it is a feature used by more than 90% of guests to book a place to stay. In ranking, we want the search results (referred to as listings) to be sorted…

DoorDash Partners with Macy’s to Power Same-Day Shopping Nationwide, Just in Time for the Holiday…

With the holidays around the corner, we know this year’s holiday shopping season is going to look a little bit different as shoppers find easier ways to browse and buy gifts during a pandemic. With this in mind, DoorDash has been working hard…