A look behind search guides
We launched Guided Search last year to give Pinners an exploratory search where they can discover the best ideas by clicking different guides to filter results. We’re continuing to make updates, such...
View ArticleHow we made JavaScript testing 15x faster
Testing is an important pillar in our engineering infrastructure. We have hundreds of A/B experiments running at any given time. To keep these experiments running smoothly, it’s critical to have...
View ArticleDiscover Pinterest: Search and Discovery
As we continue to focus on making search improvements and building a discovery engine, we recently invited members of the local search communities to Pinterest for a Discover Pinterest event. Hugh...
View ArticleHow holdout groups drive sustainable growth
When it comes to growth, one potential pitfall is over optimizing for short-term wins. Growth teams operate at a pretty fast pace, and our team is no exception. We’re always running dozens of...
View ArticleReal-time analytics at Pinterest
As thousands of people gather in the Bay Area this week for Strata + Hadoop World, we wanted to share how data-driven decision making is in our company DNA. Most recently, we built a real-time data...
View ArticleFighting spam at Pinterest
Spammers used to love us, but not anymore.Pinterest is a great platform to spam because of the large amount of traffic we drive to other sites. Spammers want to divert traffic to their sites so Pinners...
View ArticleOpen-sourcing PINCache
Because the Pinterest iOS app downloads and processes an enormous amount of data, we use a caching system to cache models and images to avoid eating into our Pinners’ (users’) data plans. For quite...
View Article4 steps to better goals and metrics
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” - Sun TzuI’ve found over and over again that many organizations suffer from the same...
View ArticleServing configuration data at scale with high availability
We have a lot of important and common data that’s not modified frequently but accessed at a very high rate. One example is our spam domain blacklist. Since we don’t want to show Pinners spammy Pins,...
View ArticleOpen-sourcing Pinball
As we continue to build in a fast and dynamic environment, we need a workflow manager that’s flexible and can keep up with our data processing needs. After trying a few options, we decided to build one...
View ArticleMaking Pinterest HTTPS
Pinner safety is a top priority for us, and so earlier this year we joined the growing list of websites that are fully HTTPS. As we build trust with Pinners, it significantly improves security in one...
View ArticlePinnability: Machine learning in the home feed
Pinterest hosts more than 30 billion Pins (and growing) with rich contextual and visual information. Tens of millions of Pinners (users) interact with the site every day by browsing, searching,...
View ArticleWhy you should be A/B testing your infrastructure
The benefits of using a data-driven approach to product development are widely known. Most companies understand the benefits of running an A/B experiment when adding a new feature or redesigning a...
View ArticleLearn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL
A good portion of the startups I meet and advise want to use the newest, hottest technology to build something that’s cool, but not technologically groundbreaking. I have yet to meet a startup building...
View ArticleShared web credentials: A simpler way to log in
Our top priority is to create a great user experience in everything we build, and across platforms. As part of that, each day we work to reduce the effort it takes to use Pinterest. So when Apple...
View ArticleImproving Pinning with a predictive board picker
Every day, tens of millions of people discover and save Pins on Pinterest, making the Pinning flow one of the most important features. It’s so important that we’re constantly and carefully making...
View ArticleIntroducing the Pinterest Developers Platform
Every day, millions of people use Pinterest to save creative ideas for recipes, articles, places to travel, products and more. Today we’re announcing the beta version of the Pinterest Developers...
View ArticleUnder the hood: Teletraan deploy system
Among the things a developer worries about most, deploy is near - or at - the top of the list. A deployment is often the first time a new code change runs in the production environment. A dependable...
View ArticleBuilding a scalable machine vision pipeline
Discovery on Pinterest is all about finding things you love, even if you don’t know at first what you’re looking for. The Visual Discovery engineering team is tasked with building technology that will...
View ArticleBuilding security into buyable Pins
Earlier this week, we announced buyable Pins, a simple and secure way to buy your favorite products on Pinterest. When building buyable Pins, we focused on making the technology easy and fun to use...
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