Weekly Subscriptions

My Journey to Airbnb — Rachel Zhao

My Journey to Airbnb — Rachel ZhaoFrom an uncertain software engineering student to Head of Search Engineering.If there’s one thing travel teaches us, it’s that the journey is just as important as the destination. With this in mind, we’re launching a new series of blog posts to bring you the personal stories of our amazing Airfam! How did they initially connect with t...

Search indexing optimisation

Modern applications commonly utilise various database engines, with each serving a specific need. At Grab Deliveries, MySQL database (DB) is utilised to store canonical forms of data, and Elasticsearch to provide advanced search capabilities. MySQL serves as the primary data storage for raw data, and Elasticsearch as the derived storage. Search data flow Eff...

Powering iOS, Android and web experiences with a backend-for-frontend

Hi there 👋 I’m Skye, and I’m a Software Engineer at iZettle. I work in the Understand team in the Food & Drink Area, on our mobile apps, websites, and backend services.When building our new iZettle Food & Drink products, we encountered challenges in getting data to our clients in a fast and efficient way, and this article discusses how we fixed some of those i...

Triggered: Incident #1234 (incident process needs fixing)

This is a story of a small group who, voluntarily, got together to improve the incident handling process within our company. It is not a “we did great, you should do the same” story, rather a “this is what we did, what would you do?” one.Our product development department consists of cross-functional teams who have high autonomy, with full ownership of what they deliv...

Implementing Observability in a Service Mesh

A Command-and-Control Center image taken from www.appliedglobal.comI work as an SRE at iZettle and, at times during my on-call, it can be challenging to understand the contributing factors of incidents when they occur or the nature of failures as they happen. As someone running a Microservices Architecture, it’s not an easy task setting up some decent level of observa...

A Journey from Software to Machine Learning Engineer at iZettle

Custom made mug featuring Chris Albon’s Machine Learning Flash CardsI have been working at iZettle for about four years now. I did not start my journey at this company as a Machine Learning Engineer, but rather transitioned to it as I was growing within the company.My formal education is Computer Science/Software Engineering, and in fact I have been working as a softw...

Netflix Cloud Packaging in the Terabyte Era

By Xiaomei Liu, Rosanna Lee, Cyril ConcolatoIntroductionBehind the scenes of the beloved Netflix streaming service and content, there are many technology innovations in media processing. Packaging has always been an important step in media processing. After content ingestion, inspection and encoding, the packaging step encapsulates encoded video and audio in codec agn...

Real-Time Exactly-Once Ad Event Processing with Apache Flink and Kafka

Uber recently launched a new capability: Ads on UberEats. With this new ability came new challenges that needed to be solved at Uber, such as systems for ad auctions, bidding, attribution, reporting, and more. This article focuses on how we ... The post Real-Time Exactly-Once Ad Event Processing with Apache Flink and Kafka appeared first on Uber Engineering Blog. ...

How Backstage Made Our Developers More Effective — And How It Can Help Yours, Too

What’s the best way to assess your developers’ experience and performance to discover what they need help with? Is it by measuring something arbitrary, like how many lines of code they’ve written or how many commits they’ve made? Nope. How much useful data are you really getting out of those numbers anyway? Instead, it’s more ......