How we built a Transformer-based sequence model that encodes years of guest behavior to surface the right listings at the right time. By: Daochen Zha , Chun How Tan , Xin Liu , Bin Xu , Han Zhao , Xiaowei Liu , Jun Shi , Tracy Yu , Hui Gao , Huiji Gao , Liwei He , Michael Kinoti ,…
#technology
48 posts
21 Jul
20 Jul
A look at compensating for position bias in recommender systems using negative sampling strategies By: Andrew Morss, Senior Applied Scientist Introduction A recommender system is a machine learning model that, given a user and a catalog of items, predicts which items that user is most likely to want. Recommenders set your YouTube playlist, determine what items Amazon suggests for you,…
17 Jul
Ask a tech company CFO where the quarter's margin is landing, and you will get a...
14 Jul
Training an LLM is the easy part. The hard part is designing experiments and evaluations that you can trust enough to know whether the new model is actually an improvement. By : Baharak Saberidokht Introduction Shipping a production LLM system means iterating fast on improvements to something that is, by construction, non-deterministic. Models drift, judges disagree with themselves, references regenerate…
9 Jul
How Databricks hackathons workWe run these hackathons for a simple reason: the fastest...
You did something wrong as a kid. You knew you weren’t supposed to. And somewhere in the house, your mom just found out. Your heart is going faster than it ever has. You’re calculating exit routes. And then you hear it: the slap of a chappal being picked up. You’ve accepted your fate. You’re bracing for impact. And then it…
9 Jun
How Airbnb’s data engineers and analytics engineers built a consistent and flexible data modeling framework to support the expansion into Homes, Experiences, and Services. By : Patrick Lam , Namrata Lamba , Jamie Stober With the May 2025 Summer Release, Airbnb redesigned its app, relaunched Experiences, and debuted Services, pushing us beyond our traditional Homes focus. For the data teams,…
8 Jun
null How I Built a 47-Signal Website Audit Tool That Runs in 15 Seconds on SitePoint.
2 Jun
How Airbnb used sequential geographic recovery signals and prior propagation to generate reliable corridor-level forecasts when local data was scarce. By: Harrison Katz The problem with unprecedented shocks Almost every forecasting system is built on the same implicit assumption: the future will resemble the past. You train on historical data, you validate on holdout periods, and you trust that past…
19 May
How Airbnb shifts from PaaS to an internal knowledge graph infrastructure at scale. By: Lucen Zhao , Shukun Yang , Ashish Jain Knowledge graphs offer a natural and powerful way to represent relationships between entities. Many real-world systems are fundamentally about connections. Airbnb’s identity graph captures relationships between users in a graph database. The identity graph serves aggregated insights that…
18 May
HTML images just got better, with the subtlest change to your codebase Photo by Adi Suyatno I know what you’re thinking. Scott, I landed on Medium on a small but not mobile-small display and the download chunk related to images in my home feed was like 7% smaller. First of all, thank you for noticing. Second, what if I told…
5 May
Designing monitoring that works when everything else doesn’t. By : Abdurrahman J. Allawala Introduction When an incident hits, teams lean on observability to answer the only questions that matter: what’s broken, and why? Monitoring systems are designed to help you answer these questions, and they usually do. But what happens when your observability stack is dependent on the same systems…
28 Apr
How Airbnb built a lightweight workflow engine to solve durable execution. By : Ricardo Gamba , Andriy Sergiyenko Introduction: The durable execution problem Picture this hypothetical flow: A host submits an insurance claim about their listing to Airbnb. The system needs to validate the claim, run trust and safety checks, assess estimates, process the payout, and send notifications. Halfway through…
21 Apr
How we built a storage system that ingests 50 million samples per second and stores 2.5 petabytes of logical time series data. By : Rishabh Kumar Modern observability practice encourages instrumenting every meaningful code path. Over the past 15 years, open-source observability SDKs like Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and StatsD have made deep instrumentation nearly ubiquitous. These days, most software — open-source…
7 Apr
A production-tested approach for moving a large-scale metrics pipeline from StatsD to OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. By: Eugene Ma , Natasha Aleksandrova When migrating to a new monitoring system, you’ll want to frontload the work to collect all your metrics. This exposes bottlenecks at full write scale and unblocks the migration of assets which require real data for validation, such as…
5 Mar
Kenza Boulisfane, Software Engineer at Thumbtack, works at the intersection of data, AI, and real business impact. In this Q&A, she shares how she’s building an AI-powered Marketing Analytics Agent designed to make complex marketing data accessible to everyone. She also reflects on team culture, technical challenges, and why diverse perspectives make engineering stronger. What are you currently working on?…
5 Feb
A Q&A with Brett Shouse, Senior Software Engineer. As an engineer, what drew you to Thumbtack? I joined Thumbtack in March of 2025, and from day one it’s felt like the right place to grow, build, and make a real impact. I was ready for a fresh challenge and wanted to help evolve a business that truly aligned with my…
9 Jun 2025
Update 6/10: Based on a short conversation with an engineering lead at X, some of the devices used at X are claimed to be using HSMs. See more further below. Matthew Garrett has a nice post about Twitter (uh, X)’s new end-to-end encryption messaging protocol, which is now called XChat. The TL;DR of Matthew’s post … Continue reading A bit…
27 Feb 2025
Scrum, Agile Fitting Scrum for Software Development — Part II Break down stories like a boss and a few more tricks source Many software teams use Scrum, but it comes with challenges. While it originated in software development, its creators made it broad enough to work across industries. The idea? Teams should adapt and improve it while sticking to core…
24 Jan 2025
Scrum, Agile Make your stand-ups short and concise, focus on value added source Scrum is a framework that gives teams the freedom to build their own processes. Unfortunately, teams often create complex, bloated processes that eat up all their time and leave little room for value-added or improvement work. How often do your daily stand-ups stretch past 30 minutes? Last…
20 Dec 2024
Forms are everywhere online, from signing up for newsletters to making purchases. But let’s be honest — nothing’s more frustrating than a form that’s hard to fill out or riddled with unclear error messages. In this post, we’ll dive into practical tips and tricks to make your form validation seamless, user-friendly, and maybe even enjoyable! We’ll walk through tips for…
21 Feb 2024
I have now been a Software Engineering Team Lead on the BBC Sounds mobile apps team for 4 years. So what have I learned from this once-daunting, now-familiar role? Leadership does not mean telling people what to do. Mother Goose is holding back here and letting the baby gosling stride confidently ahead Before working at the BBC, I thought a…
21 Jan 2024
Writing testable code is a vital skill in software engineering. Let’s explore practical advice, strategies, and tactics for writing more testable code, unlocking the benefits of modularity, reusability, and high quality software in your projects. Embracing testability in your coding practice isn’t just about catching bugs; it’s about fostering a culture of quality and efficiency in your projects. A good…
31 Dec 2023
The world of JavaScript has evolved significantly, and interview trends have changed a lot over the years. This guide features 10 essential questions that every JavaScript developer should know the answers to in 2024. It covers a range of topics from closures to TDD, equipping you with the knowledge and confidence to tackle modern JavaScript challenges. As a hiring manager,…
22 Aug 2023
- By Frontend UX Team In the world of rapid software development, managing multiple applications efficiently is crucial. As MakeMyTrip grows its software ecosystem, maintaining a smooth and effective development process is more important than ever. In this blog post, we will explore why the Common Library is essential, navigate adoption challenges, discuss its execution process, and seamlessly integrate it…
24 Jul 2023
AI language models, such as ChatGPT and Claude, empower anyone to create software. These models can intelligently understand problems, create solutions, and explain the solutions. But natural language isn’t always the best way to communicate with AI. If you need to keep track of complex data and define how you interact with that data in specific ways, SudoLang can help.…
13 Jul 2023
Threads is a new social network from the Instagram team that rocketed to 100 million members in just 5 days. Obviously, Threads membership got a boost from the 2.35 billion members of Instagram, but don’t write off those membership growth numbers. To be counted as a threads member, you need to download the app and create your Threads profile, which…
6 Jul 2023
CRED curious with Kailash Nath In the latest episode of CRED Curious, Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha, sat down with Kunal Shah to discuss A.I’s inevitable impact, serendipity, climate change and why life goals are irrelevant in a universe that prefers chance. Intrigued? Then head to CRED YT channel and watch the whole session here . AI, coincidences, greek philosophy…
19 Jun 2023
All the news and updates from the 2023 Guardian Product and Engineering away day The second session of the unconference time has come to a close. There will now be some time for feedback on the topics. Who will step up to share their thoughts? It’s nearly time on session two. I’m hearing there will be a brief summary of…
12 Jun 2023
Your First Steps with SudoLang If you want to build chat bots, games, or applications using AI models like ChatGPT, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’re going to dive into the basics of SudoLang, a powerful natural language pseudocode programming language designed to instruct advanced language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude, and others. SudoLang was…
1 May 2023
Image by Eric Elliott using PromptCrafter and Midjourney SudoLang is a powerful natural language pseudocode programming language that makes it easier to instruct OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude, and other language models. For an overview of language features and benefits, check out The Art of Effortless Programming and Unit Testing ChatGPT Prompts: Introducing Riteway for SudoLang . To gain a better…
3 Apr 2023
Running Riteway’s usage example tests in SudoLang running on ChatGPT using GPT-4 I have been a long-time advocate of Test-Driven Development (TDD) because of its many productivity and quality benefits. You can read more about those in “TDD Changed My Life” . When I realized that GPT-4 was capable of following complex instructions, one of the first things I thought…
1 Apr 2023
Pseudocode is a fantastic way to sketch programs using informal, natural language, without worrying about specific syntax. It’s like sketching your thoughts before diving into the nitty-gritty of coding. It’s useful for brainstorming and communicating ideas with others. I have been using pseudocode to express ideas to Large Language Models (LLMs) since GPT-3 was announced in mid 2020. However, up…
17 Mar 2023
TL;DR — Great, but Can’t Replace Expert Mentors, Yet! Actual Photo of ChatGPT Teaching Puppies to Code (Just Kidding it’s Midjourney) GPT-4 was just released , and it represents significant enhancements over ChatGPT powered by GPT-3.5. Among the enhancements is an improved ability to maintain coherence over longer sessions and larger prompts. I spent years building EricElliottJS.com to teach developers…
22 Nov 2022
Nihal and his friends at HackaNoodle 2022 What do you say when someone asks you why are you participating in a Hackathon? Saying that you’ve come to a hackathon for (free) food is not the ideal response, and more so to a CEO. It was a Saturday morning, and I was in the Blinkit headquarters for a hackathon. Our team…
10 Nov 2022
Polling vs Streaming, Which one is better? — What we have used in MakeMyTrip Flights. Polling and streaming are the ways of communication between server and client. Streaming:- It is described as the process in which a client sends a request to the server for receiving data in chunks. First, a connection is established using sockets, and then the server…
21 Apr 2022
23 Feb 2022
That’s a bold statement I know, but let me explain exactly why I believe this is true, and why I’m so passionate about it. The BBC which is celebrating its centenary this year is like no other organisation in the world. Our job is simple, to ensure that it remains just as relevant in the future as it has been…
10 Feb 2022
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27 Jul 2020
9 May 2020
Let's revisit one of the most humiliating (and expensive) moments of my life. It happened a decade ago and even today I cringe and seethe when I think about it. I was one of 25 finalists for a $20,000 scholarship in my junior year of college. The last step was an hour long interview with […]