Technology
We track 26 posts about Technology from 11 engineering blogs. Most active: Airbnb, Thumbtack, Medium. Latest post: Oct 6, 2026.
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Beyond synthetic testing: Capturing and replaying real database workloads at Airbnb (opens on the source site)
Airbnb ·
How we capture real production database traffic at Airbnb and replay it offline to load-test, plan capacity, and de-risk upgrades.By: Zuofei Wang, Erluo LiIntroductionAt Airbnb, MySQL-compatible databases are a critical backbone of our online database infrastructure: a fleet of hundreds of clusters supporting thousands of use cases at millions of queries per second (QPS). Operating databases at scale brings hard problems, including sizing clusters for future growth, keeping behavior consistent across version upgrades and migrations, and reproducing production incidents well enough to debug…
Introducing Hostinger Restore: Making technology accessible to environmental innovators (opens on the source site)
A lot of environmental work starts by counting species, restoring habitats, organizing volunteers, tracking waste, or teaching communities. At some point, though, you may need … The post Introducing Hostinger Restore: Making technology accessible to environmental innovators appeared first on Hostinger Blog.
What We Built for Medium Editors This Year (and What I Broke) (opens on the source site)
Medium ·
A behind-the-scenes look at bulk declines, decline reasons, a content calendar, and one very bad hourA few months ago, we took an honest look at publications on Medium and asked if they were succeeding. Were users incentivized to create quality publications on Medium?We had the Boost Nomination Program, which was helpful for the cohort that was selected, but we didn’t have any signal that the BNP was motivating for other users. Were we getting higher quality articles as a result of BNP?So we asked ourselves “How can we reward good editors for their editorial work and make it clear how others…
Personalization without user identity (opens on the source site)
Airbnb ·
How Airbnb uses proximity signals to personalize without relying on individual user history.By: Wei Jiang, Bin Xu, Bharathi Thangamani, Weiwei Guo, Sundar Srinivasavaradhan, Tracy Yu, Huiji Gao, Swapnil Ghike, Michael KinotiGreat personalization starts with knowing your user. But what happens when the user is a stranger?A significant share of Airbnb users arrive without a login, without a recent search history, or without any prior booking — especially those landing from paid advertising or organic search. For these users, the ML models that power search ranking, destination recommendations,…
The guest journey, updated in real time: extending Airbnb’s sequence recommender with Chronon (opens on the source site)
Airbnb ·
How two new Chronon capabilities, Push Mode and NRT Model Transform, allows us to provide more relevant search results instantly as a guest explores, rather than waiting for the next batch run.By: Pengyu Hou, Yuli Han, Daochen Zha, Haozhen Ding, Xin Liu, Sophie Wang, Pallavi Adusumilli, Sherry Li, Henry Saputra, Chun How Tan, Huiji Gao, Yan Zhang, Stephanie Moyerman, Yi Li, and Sanjeev KatariyaA guest’s interaction with Airbnb doesn’t pause to wait for a nightly batch job. Someone might browse a dozen listings on a Tuesday afternoon, run a new search that evening, and expect the next search…
Project Lighthouse — Part 3: Introducing project-lighthouse-anonymize (opens on the source site)
Airbnb ·
Project Lighthouse — Part 3: Introducing project-lighthouse-anonymizeThe data in Project Lighthouse is powered by privacy-preserving anonymization code. We’ve put this code into open source, and published two new technical papers detailing the scalable algorithms and data quality frameworks behind it.By: Adam BloomstonIntroductionIn 2020, we launched Project Lighthouse, which we developed in partnership with leading civil rights and privacy organizations. As our 2020 announcement details, Project Lighthouse enables us to measure potential disparities in user experiences. This work uses…
Leading Publishers Bring Blockbuster PC Games and Technology to NVIDIA RTX Spark (opens on the source site)
Nvidia ·
NVIDIA is bringing the next wave of RTX gaming to the Gamescom conference running this week in Cologne, Germany, with support for new games, anti-cheat technologies and increased visual quality. Electronic Arts, Embark and Ubisoft are among the latest game publishers and developers bringing their blockbuster titles to NVIDIA RTX Spark ahead of its launch […]
How we knew COVID was over (and what our models had to unlearn) (opens on the source site)
Airbnb ·
When we retrain, when we rebuild, and when we leave a model alone.By: Harrison KatzA forecast that carries weightThe Forecasting Data Science team at Airbnb produces many of the forecasts the rest of the company plans around: demand, bookings, cancellations, and a range of finer cuts by market and segment, refreshed continuously across thousands of markets. The targets differ, and the models differ, but they have one thing in common: Other teams build on top of them.This means a forecast that is casually wrong is not a clean miss, as it might be in an academic setting. That’s because a small…
Flexible Authentication: Reimagining authentication for millions of users at Airbnb (opens on the source site)
Airbnb ·
Rebuilding login and signup surfaced product insights, not just technical challenges. Here’s how we designed Flexible Authentication at the intersection of product intuition and technical architecture.By: Jose Santos, Mike BarryFor Airbnb, logins at irregular intervals are normal. A guest books a trip in January and may not open the app again until summer. A host checks back only when a reservation comes in, and may be busy with other activities when it does. For a two-sided marketplace where a failed login means a lost booking, and lost revenue for both the guest and the host, long gaps…
Twilio Flex: the technology powering human connection (opens on the source site)
Twilio ·
Twilio Flex underpins national charity Age UK’s volunteer-led initiatives, most notably their Telephone Friendship Service.
How We Moved 1,500 Android Screenshot Tests to Roborazzi (opens on the source site)
How we moved 1,500 Android screenshot tests to Roborazzi.IntroductionIf you’re a mobile developer you’re probably no stranger to screenshot tests. Making sure that layouts remain consistent as time goes on and code changes is important for ensuring functionality and accessibility. Since Thumbtack uses Kotlin and Jetpack Compose for its Android apps, we had historically been using Firebase Test Lab to capture and compare layouts. However, using Firebase can be slow, tedious, and error-prone, so we decided it was time for a change. Instead of Firebase, we decided to migrate to using Roborazzi,…
Personalizing Airbnb search by learning from the guest journey (opens on the source site)
Airbnb ·
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, Stephanie Moyerman, and Sanjeev KatariyaIntroductionPlanning a trip on Airbnb rarely happens in a single session. A guest searching for a place to stay in San Francisco might browse dozens of listings over several days, leaving behind a trail of views. Typically, over a period of years, that same guest will have accumulated many…
Building a Transformer-Based Category Recommender at Thumbtack (opens on the source site)
A look at compensating for position bias in recommender systems using negative sampling strategiesBy: Andrew Morss, Senior Applied ScientistIntroductionA 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, push you songs on Spotify and customize your Steam store. If you’re a homeowner, Thumbtack’s recommender systems can suggest home projects for you such as house cleaning or lawn mowing.Thumbtack connects users with…
From weeks to a day: how we made LLM evaluation fast enough to iterate on (opens on the source site)
Airbnb ·
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 SaberidokhtIntroductionShipping 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 as different strings, and bugs may persist until the next release, because retraining takes weeks. Most of this friction comes from infrastructure challenges, not model quality, and the fixes…
Dangerous Technology For Americans Only (opens on the source site)
There is a bit of schadenfreude on Twitter right now about Anthropic being hit by the US government’s export control directive to suspend access to Fable and Mythos. Anthropic and their leadership have spent a lot of time and effort describing its own technology as dangerous and in need of strict controls and regulation. Now that the US government appears to have taken that framing seriously and told them to turn it off for foreign nationals I can see why people are making fun of that situation. I understand the reaction, but I urge you to not entertain it for too long because it is a giant…
Scaling beyond one: How Airbnb evolved its data architecture for a multi-product world (opens on the source site)
Airbnb ·
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 StoberWith 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, this meant rapidly evolving a decade-old infrastructure to integrate two brand-new product pillars. Our data engineers and analytics engineers rose to the challenge by building a consistent and flexible…
When history fails you, borrow from geography (opens on the source site)
Airbnb ·
How Airbnb used sequential geographic recovery signals and prior propagation to generate reliable corridor-level forecasts when local data was scarce.By: Harrison KatzThe problem with unprecedented shocksAlmost 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 patterns will at least roughly indicate future performance. When this assumption breaks, the model does not gracefully degrade; it fails confidently. It produces precise, well-calibrated intervals…
Scaling Airbnb’s identity graph with a unified knowledge graph infrastructure (opens on the source site)
Airbnb ·
How Airbnb shifts from PaaS to an internal knowledge graph infrastructure at scale.By: Lucen Zhao, Shukun Yang, Ashish JainKnowledge 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 enable user identity resolution and relationship understanding. These capabilities support a wide range of Trust and Safety use cases, from detecting suspicious activities to identifying…
How we improved image download sizes on Medium with just four characters (opens on the source site)
Medium ·
HTML images just got better, with the subtlest change to your codebasePhoto by Adi SuyatnoI 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 you that you too can improve your total asset download size by adding just four characters to your code base?Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, I’m here to tell you, it’s true… after I explain how we got here.The history of images on the webAs a web developer, you’ve…
Reframing Healthcare Technology in the AI Era (opens on the source site)
At 8th Light, we help healthcare organizations design and build AI-enabled systems that put people first, combining product strategy, human-centered design, and technology leadership to create innovative solutions that work for clinicians as well as patients. Why This MattersAlthough AI continues to dominate healthtech headlines, many frontline clinicians are still battling clunky systems, fragmented workflows, and administrative overload. The reality? Healthcare practitioners are not asking for more technology, they’re asking for more time with patients.The tension between innovation and…
Working at the intersection of data and AI with Kenza Boulisfane (opens on the source site)
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?I’m working on building a Marketing Analytics Agent. It’s an AI-powered marketing expert that provides companywide support, regardless of technical background. The idea is simple: marketing…
Walk Out Technology Is Hitting Its Stride (opens on the source site)
This technology platform, called 'Just Walk Out', required over 1,000 workers in India manually reviewing video footage to verify transactions. By 2022, 700 out of every 1,000 sales needed human review. Amazon pulled the technology from their Fresh grocery stores in 2024. They paved the way. But it wasn't sustainable.The problem wasn't the concept. It was the complexity. Grocery stores carry thousands of SKUs, items without barcodes, and unpredictable customer behavior at scale. In fact, this same technology is succeeding in stadiums and small-format stores. Mashgin kiosks are deployed across…
Engineering at scale, with purpose. (opens on the source site)
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 values.I took a very intentional approach to my search. I reviewed the career sites of 106 companies to deeply understand their cultures, and from that process I applied and interviewed with four outstanding organizations. Each had strong teams and compelling missions, but Thumbtack…
A bit more on Twitter/X’s new encrypted messaging (opens on the source site)
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 more on Twitter/X’s new encrypted messaging →
eBay Reduces the Time to List on Mobile With New Simplified Selling Tool, Now Featuring Magical Listing AI Technology (opens on the source site)
Ebay ·
Introducing an easier, more streamlined experience that makes listing creation faster and more effortless for sellers in the U.S. and U.K.
Scaling Technology with Architectural Principles (opens on the source site)
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This page is generated automatically from the engineering blogs we follow. Every post links to its source, where it was published. See all sources.