Reading room.
Engineering blogs & AI research
A reading room from engineering teams and AI labs: titles, short feed excerpts, and links to the originals. For my own essays, explore the writing archive.
- 1359 articles tracked
- 37 sources
- Refresh scheduled daily
Sources
SocialReasoning-Bench: Measuring whether AI agents act in users’ best interests
Using SocialReasoning Bench, we observed a stable pattern across models—agents execute competently, but fail to consistently improve the user’s position, even with explicit instructions to optimize for user interest. The…
Five vertical SaaS insights from Sessions 2026
AI is forcing platforms to expand beyond pure software. See how vertical SaaS platforms are using payments, financial services, and agentic commerce to build more durable businesses.
ML based ranking using Nrtsearch
We’ve extended Nrtsearch with the Inference Plugin, which embeds ML-based ranking directly in the search layer — eliminating the need for a standalone scoring service. We use Nrtsearch (read more information on the blog…
Adaptive Parallel Reasoning: The Next Paradigm in Efficient Inference Scaling
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How Discord Automates ScyllaDB Clusters at Scale
You ve been asked to stand up a brand-new database cluster, meaning a whole day of configuring dozens of nodes, validating replication, wiring up dual-write pipelines… what if this whole ordeal took less than two hours?…
Scaling ArchUnit with Nebula ArchRules
By John Burns and Emily Yuan Introduction At Netflix, we operate using a polyrepo strategy with tens of thousands of Java repositories. This means that we need to have ways of sharing common build logic across these repo…
Scaling ArchUnit with Nebula ArchRules
By John Burns and Emily Yuan Introduction At Netflix, we operate using a polyrepo strategy with tens of thousands of Java repositories. This means that we need to have ways of sharing common build logic across these repo…
Enhancing Ad Relevance: Integrating Real-Time Context into Sequential Recommender Models
Huiqin Xin | Machine Learning Engineer II, Ads Vertical Modeling; Lakshmi Manoharan | Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Vertical Modeling; Karthik Jayasurya | Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Signals; Ziwei Guo |…
Stock Up in the New Rust Shop! Enjoy a Discord-Only 20% Sale on Most Items until 5/21
Starting today, you can now browse, purchase, and even gift and wishlist in-game items for Rust directly in Discord! See how it all works, and learn about a hefty two-week Discord-exclusive launch discount on a wide sele…
Enhancing Flink deployment with shadow testing
Introduction Ensuring the reliability of Apache Flink deployments in Grab is crucial for the availability of our business-critical, real-time applications. While all applications are tested in a staging environment befor…
Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview
Two weeks ago we announced that we had identified and fixed an unprecedented number of latent security bugs in Firefox with the help of Claude Mythos Preview and other AI models. In this post, we’ll go into more detail a…
Monitoring reliably at scale
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?…
Trustworthy JavaScript for the Open Web
The open web is a critical platform for applications that handle highly sensitive data, from private communications to financial transactions and medical records. Traditionally, servers are trusted to deliver the appropr…
From SSH to REST: A Security-Driven Modernization of Slack’s EMR Data Pipelines
Excerpt By 2024, Slack s data platform had accumulated 700+ SSH-based operators orchestrating critical data pipelines. We re talking daily search indexing that processed terabytes of data, analytics jobs powering busines…
Discord Patch Notes: May 4, 2026
Check out the finer details of the more technical fixes implemented into Discord recently.
Empowering Carrot Ads with Domain Adaptive Learning
Authors: Trey Zhong, Xiyu Wang Contributors: Joseph Haraldson, Sharad Gupta, Sarah Lamacchia Introduction Carrot Ads is Instacart’s omnichannel retail media solution that allows retailer partners to build and scale their…
Empowering Carrot Ads with Domain Adaptive Learning
Authors: Trey Zhong, Xiyu Wang Contributors: Joseph Haraldson, Sharad Gupta, Sarah Lamacchia Introduction Carrot Ads is Instacart’s omnichannel retail media solution that allows retailer partners to build and scale their…
How Meta Is Strengthening End-to-End Encrypted Backups
The HSM-based Backup Key Vault Meta s HSM-based Backup Key Vault provides the foundation for end-to-end encrypted backups for WhatsApp and Messenger. The system allows people to protect their backed-up message history wi…
Optimizing ML Workload Network Efficiency (Part I): Feature Trimmer
Guangtong Bai | Staff Software Engineer, Product ML Infrastructure*; Shantam Shorewala | Software Engineer II, Product ML Infrastructure*; Chi Zhang | Staff Software Engineer, AI Platform*; Neha Upadhyay | Software Engin…
Building a Natural Language Interface to the Spotify Ads API with Claude Code Plugins
Turning OpenAPI spec and Markdown files into a conversational ads management tool — no compiled code required. The post Building a Natural Language Interface to the Spotify Ads API with Claude Code Plugins appeared first…
Data Mesh at Grab (Part II): The foundational tools behind certification
Introduction In Part I , we discussed why Grab is investing in a data mesh, referred to as the Signals Marketplace within Grab, as part of our evolving data culture. We also explained how data certification aids teams in…
You’ve Got (Too Much) Mail: Behind the Scenes of the 3/25/26 Voice Outage
On March 25th, voice and video on Discord suffered major degradation beginning at 12:13 PDT, lasting a little over three hours. Learn how the issue originated, how it affected systems across Discord, how we recovered, an…
Everything we announced at Sessions 2026
We’re making Stripe even more programmable; protecting and propelling your business with the strength of the Stripe network; and building economic infrastructure for AI.
Giving agents the ability to pay
Link’s wallet for agents gives agents programmatic access to Link, including the ability to generate a one-time-use card or Shared Payment Token (SPT) backed by the cards and bank accounts already in your wallet. It’s bu…
Skipper: Building Airbnb’s embedded workflow engine
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 cl…
Workflows for work that runs the business
From Clicks to Conversions: Architecting Shopping Conversion Candidate Generation at Pinterest
Authors: Richard Huang | Machine Learning Engineer II; Yu Liu | Senior Machine Learning Engineer; Ziwei Guo | Senior Machine Learning Engineer; Andy Mao | Staff Machine Learning Engineer; Supeng Ge | Sr. Staff Machine Le…
Measure Less to Learn More: Using Fewer, Higher-quality Metrics to Capture What Matters
Too many experiment metrics can make meaningful changes harder to detect. Learn how Discord used simulations and Principal Component Analysis to maximize signal and reduce noise.
How We Built a Smarter Pickup Experience for Gated Communities
If you live in a gated community, you’ve been there: You request a ride from your apartment complex, expect your driver to come to you as usual, and then — your driver’s car icon just stops right at the front gate. You w…
How We Built a Smarter Pickup Experience for Gated Communities
If you live in a gated community, you’ve been there: You request a ride from your apartment complex, expect your driver to come to you as usual, and then — your driver’s car icon just stops right at the front gate. You w…
Background Coding Agents: Supercharging Downstream Consumer Dataset Migrations (Honk, Part 4)
How we used Honk, Backstage, and Fleet Management to ease the pain of migrating thousands of datasets. The post Background Coding Agents: Supercharging Downstream Consumer Dataset Migrations (Honk, Part 4) appeared first…
How Yelp Keeps Server-Driven UI Consistent Across Four Platforms
If you’ve read our earlier post, you already know about CHAOS—the server-driven UI (SDUI) framework we built at Yelp that powers our dynamic views. Until now, we’ve explored its architecture, backend implementation, and…
Building a fault-tolerant metrics storage system at Airbnb
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 co…
Modernizing the Facebook Groups Search to Unlock the Power of Community Knowledge
We’ve fundamentally transformed Facebook Groups Search to help people more reliably discover, sort through, and validate community content that’s most relevant to them. We’ve adopted a new hybrid retrieval architecture a…
Gradient-based Planning for World Models at Longer Horizons
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Smarter URL Normalization at Scale: How MIQPS Powers Content Deduplication at Pinterest
Shanhai Liao | Senior Software Engineer, Content Acquisition and Media Platform; Di Ruan, | Senior Staff Software Engineer, Content Acquisition and Media Platform; Evan Li, | Senior Engineering Manager, Content Acquisiti…
Making Discord on Desktop Look Just Right: Display Settings to Ease the Eyes
Learn all sorts of toggles, options, and features on Discord’s desktop app to help you view media at your pace, lower the strength of colors across the app, and make app content easier to see.
Capacity Efficiency at Meta: How Unified AI Agents Optimize Performance at Hyperscale
We re sharing insights into Meta s Capacity Efficiency Program, where we ve built an AI agent platform that helps automate finding and fixing performance issues throughout our infrastructure. By leveraging encoded domain…
Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration at Meta: Framework, Lessons, and Takeaways
We’re sharing lessons learned from Meta’s post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration to help other organizations strengthen their resilience as industry transitions to post-quantum cryptography standards. We’re proposing…
Finding zombies in our systems: A real-world story of CPU bottlenecks
Vaibhav Shankar; Staff Software Engineer | Raymond Lee; Staff Software Engineer | Chia-Wei Chen; Staff Software Engineer | Shunyao Li; Sr. Software Engineer | Yi Li; Staff Software Engineer | Ambud Sharma; Principal Engi…
Privacy-first connections: Empowering social experiences at Airbnb
Discover how Airbnb prioritizes user privacy while building a more connected community, empowering guests to engage socially, connect confidently, and maintain control of their personal data. By: Joy Jing ✨ Building a mo…
Scaling Recommendation Systems with Request-Level Deduplication
Authors: Matt Lawhon | Sr. Machine Learning Engineer; Filip Ryzner | Machine Learning Engineer II; Kousik Rajesh | Machine Learning Engineer II; Chen Yang | Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer; Saurabh Vishwas Joshi | Pr…
Managing context in long-run agentic applications
Excerpt In complex, long-running agentic systems, maintaining alignment and coherent reasoning between agents requires careful design. In this second article of our series, we explore these challenges and the mechanisms…
Performance for Everyone
Author: Lin Wang (Android Performance Engineer) Default Feature For mobile apps, performance is considered as the “default feature”, which means apps are expected to run fast and be responsive. It’s just as if we expect…
Building a high-volume metrics pipeline with OpenTelemetry and vmagent
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…
Evolution of Multi-Objective Optimization at Pinterest Home feed
Homefeed: Jiacong He, Dafang He, Jie Cheng (former), Andreanne Lemay, Mostafa Keikha, Rahul Goutam, Dhruvil Deven Badani, Dylan Wang Content Quality: Jianing Sun, Qinglong Zeng ML Serving: Li Tang Introduction In feed re…
Zero downtime Upgrade: Yelp’s Cassandra 4.x Upgrade Story
The Database Reliability Engineering team at Yelp seamlessly upgraded more than a thousand Cassandra nodes with zero downtime. This post takes you behind the scenes of our upgrade strategy, from planning sessions to flaw…
Discord Patch Notes: April 6, 2026
Check out the finer details of the more technical fixes implemented into Discord recently.
Improving storage efficiency in Magic Pocket, our immutable blob store
By turning compaction into a layered, adaptive pipeline and strengthening our monitoring and controls, we made Magic Pocket more resilient to workload changes.
MULTIPLAYER SEQUEL TO ACCLAIMED AAAA GAME “THE LAST MEADOW” ANNOUNCED: PLAYABLE NOW
Band together with Discordians from across the world in Last Meadow Online, the world’s first DBMMIRPG. Available to play until April 7, 2026.