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…

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…

Trusting Metrics at Pinterest

Pinterest, like many tech companies, relies heavily on data to help inform decisions and power machine learning. This strategy fundamentally depends on the data being accurate. Over the years we’ve worked to improve the processes behind trusting core decision-making data and ensure metrics remain accurate. How Data Can Go Wrong …

How We Protect Pinners’ Passwords

Aalaa Satti | Software Engineer Amine Kamel | Head of Production Security At Pinterest, one method by which we ensure account security is through protecting Pinners’ passwords. Passwords can be problematic for a variety of reasons, including the fact that people tend to reuse their…

La evolución de la búsqueda en Pinterest

This blog article was originally posted in English. To read the English version click here. Cuando Pinterest se lanzó por primera vez, ofrecía una nueva forma de recopilar y organizar ideas de toda la web. Sin embargo, lo que comenzó como un lugar…

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…

El fantástico Fixathon

Los ingenieros de Pinterest siempre están enfocados en hacer lo mejor para el producto, pero trabajar en una base de código limpia, con buen mantenimiento y relativamente libre de errores transforma las tareas de ingeniería de ser “solo trabajo” a oportunidades agradables para…

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…

Pinterest + ktlint = ❤

Ha pasado casi un año desde que la base de código Android de Pinterest se convirtió en la prioridad de Kotlin, y aproximadamente dos años desde que adoptamos ktlint para el formato y lint de Kotlin. Hoy, compartimos que Pinterest se…

En Pinterest desarrollamos compilaciones para iOS rápidas y confiables

En Pinterest nos enfocamos en ayudar a las personas a descubrir ideas inspiradoras, desde recetas para una cena, hasta productos de estilo y para el hogar que comprar y lugares a los que viajar. Para ello, es…

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…

How to Review Code as a Junior Developer

“Just ask questions.” That was the piece of advice that completely changed my perspective on code reviews. I first started as a Software Engineer at Pinterest on the Shopping Partner Experience team right out of college. I focused on my personal learning by reading documentation…

What we learned from an iOS app OOMs incident

In early 2020, we started seeing significantly elevated out-of-memory (OOM) crashes in the Pinterest iOS app. That incident resulted in a declined Crash-Free Users Rate (CFUR), from the previous 99% to 96%, which was a steep drop. What was going on? We improved…

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…

The evolution of search at Pinterest

When Pinterest first launched it provided a new way for people to collect and organize ideas from around the web. What started as a place to save though, quickly became a unique service for discovery where Pinners could draw inspiration from each other, brands and…

Knit Con through an employee’s eyes

Originally published on Tobi’s personal blog. It’s not every day I get to spend two days with my coworkers making arepas, practicing Tai chi, learning how to plate dishes, and vibing to six different DJs. Two days immersing myself in the deepest caverns of…

How Pinterest Fights Spam Using Machine Learning

Hundreds of millions of people regularly visit Pinterest to visually discover inspiring ideas among billions of Pins. Inspiration is a high bar and we must be vigilant in ensuring that Pinners don’t see spam, harmful content or misinformation. To enforce our…

Shallow Mirror

Henry Cai | Software Engineer, Data Engineering Pinterest uses Kafka as the backbone for data transportation. As a part of our infrastructure, Kafka MirrorMaker v1 is used to replicate traffic among different Kafka clusters spread across multiple regions. Kafka MirrorMaker is a powerful tool to replicate/aggregate data between different Kafka…

How we reduced Pinterest’s iOS app size by 30+% / 50MB

We all know app size (download size[1] and local install size[2]) matters, and there is a correlation between app size and customer engagement. Many times, people make decisions about using software based on size, and even pay for bandwidth by the megabyte. Not…

Scaling Kubernetes with Assurance at Pinterest

Introduction It has been more than a year since we shared our Kubernetes Journey at Pinterest. Since then, we have delivered many features to facilitate customer adoption, ensure reliability and scalability, and build up operational experience and best practices. In general, Kubernetes platform users gave…

Detecting Image Similarity in (Near) Real-time Using Apache Flink

Pinterest is a visual platform at its core, so the need to understand and act on images is paramount. A couple of years ago, the Content Quality team designed and implemented our own batch pipeline to detect…

Open sourcing Querybook, Pinterest’s collaborative big data hub

Charlie Gu | Tech Lead, Analytics Platform, Lena Ryoo | Software Engineer, Analytics Platform, and Justin Mejorada-Pier | Engineering Manager, Analytics Platform With more than 300 billion Pins, Pinterest is powering an ever-growing and unique dataset that maps interests, ideas…

Faster Creator Content Distribution at Pinterest

At Pinterest, we are committed to building the best experience for creators to reach and inspire new audiences and for Pinners to easily discover the best ideas for them. We believe more diverse Pin formats and an efficient distribution system that builds a…

Pinterest Flink Deployment Framework

Background At Pinterest, stream processing allows us to unlock value from real time data for pinners and partners. The Stream Processing Platform team is working on building a reliable and scalable platform to support many critical streaming applications including real-time experiment analytics…

How Pinterest fights misinformation, hate speech, and self-harm content with machine learning

Pinterest is an inspiration network where people come for positivity and new ideas, and there’s nothing inspiring about harmful content. As a visual discovery engine with hundreds of billions of Pins…