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
Spaces: A CLI Built for Humans and Agents
From Custom to Open: Scalable Network Probing and HTTP/3 Readiness with Prometheus
The Problem: Legacy Tooling and Its Limitations Currently, Slack utilizes a hybrid approach to network measurement, incorporating both internal (such as traffic between AWS Availability Zones) and external (monitoring tr…
Predicting Rider Conversion in Sparse Data Environments with Bayesian Trees
At Lyft, understanding how riders go through our user experience is fundamental to operating a healthy marketplace. Specifically, it is important to have a robust model determining if a rider will actually request a ride…
Predicting Rider Conversion in Sparse Data Environments with Bayesian Trees
At Lyft, understanding how riders go through our user experience is fundamental to operating a healthy marketplace. Specifically, it is important to have a robust model determining if a rider will actually request a ride…
How Multi-Factor Authentication Helps Keep Your Discord Account Safe
A Discord account is more than just your username and avatar. That’s why it’s important to help keep your account safe and secure by using Multi-Factor Authentication, SMS Backup Authentication & QR Code Login. Learn how…
Building Biz Ask Anything: From Prototype to Product
Introduction Users have access to a wealth of information on Yelp business pages – from reviews and photos to structured information, menus, and Ask the Community feature on the business page, a single business page can…
Reducing our monorepo size to improve developer velocity
Monorepos will continue to grow as products evolve, but growth doesn’t have to mean friction.
Beyond A/B Testing: Using Surrogacy and Region-Splits to Measure Long-Term Effects in Marketplaces
Image generated with Gemini 3 Pro (Google), 2026. Written by Amber Wang and Y oonji Kim at Lyft. Background Whenever you use the Lyft app, there is a complex balancing act happening behind the scenes. Various levers are…
Beyond A/B Testing: Using Surrogacy and Region-Splits to Measure Long-Term Effects in Marketplaces
Image generated with Gemini 3 Pro (Google), 2026. Written by Amber Wang and Y oonji Kim at Lyft. Background Whenever you use the Lyft app, there is a complex balancing act happening behind the scenes. Various levers are…
Firefox Developer Edition and Beta: Try out Mozilla’s .rpm package!
In January, we introduced our Nightly package for RPM-based Linux distributions. Today, we are thrilled to announce it is now available for Firefox Beta! Firefox Beta is great for testing your sites in a version of Firef…
Discord Update: March 24, 2026 Changelog
Here s the Discord Changelog from March 24, 2026, so you can stay informed on what’s new in recent app updates!
Speaking of Voxtral
Making Ads Count: Using MMoE and Auxiliary Tasks to Better Connect Buyers & Sellers
When buyers search on Etsy, they need to quickly and easily find the perfect item. At the same time, sellers need to be confident their unique products are being seen by the right customers. Our Ads Search ranking model,…
Migrating Etsy’s database sharding to Vitess
Etsy has maintained a sharded MySQL architecture since around 2010. This database cluster contains most of Etsy’s online data and is made up of ~1,000 tables distributed across ~1,000 shards. Over the last 16 years, it h…
From firefighting to building: How AI agents restored our team’s core productivity
Abstract Grab’s Analytics Data Warehouse (ADW) team supports over 1,000 users each month. These users support an extensive repository of more than 15,000 tables, which powers approximately 50% of all queries within our d…
How Slack Rebuilt Notifications 📣
Introduction 🔔 At Slack, notifications are how teams stay in the loop, but they can also become overwhelming when not designed with intention. Our goal was to make staying informed feel effortless. We set out to rebuild…
How we optimized Dash's relevance judge with DSPy
We used DSPy to turn prompt engineering for our relevance judge into a measurable, automated optimization loop, improving task performance, cost, and how reliably it works in production.
Introducing Forge
How ROOST is Advancing Online Safety
The threat landscape online has shifted dramatically. Many online platforms are left to reinvent safety tools from scratch. That’s the gap ROOST was built to close — and it’s why open-sourcing battle-tested tools like Os…
Mistral AI partners with NVIDIA to accelerate open frontier models | Mistral AI
Leanstral: Open-Source foundation for trustworthy vibe-coding
Introducing Mistral Small 4
Identifying Interactions at Scale for LLMs
--> Understanding the behavior of complex machine learning systems, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), is a critical challenge in modern artificial intelligence. Interpretability research aims to make the decisio…
You’re Now Discord Official: Developers, Claim Your Game and Verify Your Server
Developers can now claim and customize their game’s profiles on Discord. Curate your game’s presence on the platform to help people discover more about your game, and get your server verified in the process! Read on to s…
Enabling R8 optimization at scale with AI-assisted debugging
Grab is Southeast Asia’s leading superapp, providing a suite of services that bring essential needs to users throughout the region. Its offerings include ride-hailing, food delivery, parcel delivery, mobile payments, and…
Rails testing on autopilot: Building an agent that writes what developers won't
Building on the Social Layer of Games: What’s New from GDC 2026
At GDC 2026, Discord gives developers more ways to close the gap between connection and play.
Discord Patch Notes: March 6, 2026
Check out the finer details of the more technical fixes implemented into Discord recently.
Reclaiming Terabytes: Optimizing Android image caching with TLRU
Introduction In a previous post, we discussed Project Bonsai , our initiative to reduce the Grab app’s download size. We successfully reduced the Android Application Package (APK) download size by 26%. This reduction off…
Using LLMs to amplify human labeling and improve Dash search relevance
How we train Dash's search ranking models with a mix of human and LLM-assisted labeling.
Our Early Journey to Transform Instacart’s Discovery Recommendations with LLMs
Key Contributors: Moein Hasani, Hamidreza Shahidi, Trace Levinson, Guanghua Shu Introduction At Instacart, we are laser-focused on improving the user experience by making shopping feel easy, engaging, and personalized. O…
Our Early Journey to Transform Instacart’s Discovery Recommendations with LLMs
Key Contributors: Moein Hasani, Hamidreza Shahidi, Trace Levinson, Guanghua Shu Introduction At Instacart, we are laser-focused on improving the user experience by making shopping feel easy, engaging, and personalized. O…
Why is WebAssembly a second-class language on the web?
This post is an expanded version of a presentation I gave at the 2025 WebAssembly CG meeting in Munich. WebAssembly has come a long way since its first release in 2017. The first version of WebAssembly was already a grea…
Goodbye innerHTML, Hello setHTML: Stronger XSS Protection in Firefox 148
Cross-site scripting (XSS) remains one of the most prevalent vulnerabilities on the web. The new standardized Sanitizer API provides a straightforward way for web developers to sanitize untrusted HTML before inserting it…
Scaling Localization with AI at Lyft
Written by Stefan Zier For years, Lyft’s localization infrastructure relied exclusively on human translation. While this model usually ensured excellent quality, it was bound by multi-day turnarounds and costs that scale…
Scaling Localization with AI at Lyft
Written by Stefan Zier For years, Lyft’s localization infrastructure relied exclusively on human translation. While this model usually ensured excellent quality, it was bound by multi-day turnarounds and costs that scale…
Turning Data into Velocity: Caper’s Edge and Cloud Data Flywheel with Capsight
Key Contributors: Youming Luo, Andrew Tanner, Matas Sriubiskis, Sylvia Lin, Sikun Zhu, Lei Li, Xiao Zhou Introduction Caper is Instacart’s AI-powered smart cart that provides customers with a fast, seamless, and intuitiv…
Turning Data into Velocity: Caper’s Edge and Cloud Data Flywheel with Capsight
Key Contributors: Youming Luo, Andrew Tanner, Matas Sriubiskis, Sylvia Lin, Sikun Zhu, Lei Li, Xiao Zhou Introduction Caper is Instacart’s AI-powered smart cart that provides customers with a fast, seamless, and intuitiv…
How low-bit inference enables efficient AI
Making products like Dropbox Dash accessible to individuals and businesses means tackling new challenges around efficiency and resource use.
Trusting the Untestable: Validation and Diagnostics for the Doubly Robust Models
written by Ross Chu and Shima Nassiri The Causal Frontier: Measurement Beyond Randomization The gold standard for determining the causal impact of a policy or product change at a company like Lyft is the A/B test (random…
Trusting the Untestable: Validation and Diagnostics for the Doubly Robust Models
written by Ross Chu and Shima Nassiri The Causal Frontier: Measurement Beyond Randomization The gold standard for determining the causal impact of a policy or product change at a company like Lyft is the A/B test (random…
Launching Interop 2026
The Interop Project is a cross-browser initiative to improve web compatibility in areas that offer the most benefit to both users and developers. The group, including Apple, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla, takes…
Insights from our executive roundtable on AI and engineering productivity
From Claude Code to Cursor, we're big adopters of AI coding tools at Dropbox. The early results have been promising, but there are still a lot of open questions about how to work with these tools most effectively and whe…
From print to digital: Making weekly flyers shoppable at Instacart through computer vision and LLMs
From Print to Digital: Making Weekly Flyers Shoppable at Instacart Through Computer Vision and LLMs Key contributors: Prithvi Srinivasan, Shishir Kumar Prasad, Kristen Morgan, Bryan Pham, Rick Shukla, Preeti Chadha, Vipu…
From print to digital: Making weekly flyers shoppable at Instacart through computer vision and LLMs
From Print to Digital: Making Weekly Flyers Shoppable at Instacart Through Computer Vision and LLMs Key contributors: Prithvi Srinivasan, Shishir Kumar Prasad, Kristen Morgan, Bryan Pham, Rick Shukla, Preeti Chadha, Vipu…
Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound.
Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound.
Migrating to Jetpack Compose
Migrating to Jetpack Compose: How AI Accelerated Our Journey at Caper Introduction At Instacart, our Caper smart carts bring together AI, computer vision, and real-time data to power the future of in-store shopping. Cust…
Migrating to Jetpack Compose
Migrating to Jetpack Compose: How AI Accelerated Our Journey at Caper Introduction At Instacart, our Caper smart carts bring together AI, computer vision, and real-time data to power the future of in-store shopping. Cust…
How Yelp Built a Back-Testing Engine for Safer, Smarter Ad Budget Allocation
Introduction Modern advertising platforms are fast-paced and interconnected: even small adjustments can have ripple effects on how ads are shown, how budgets are spent, and the value advertisers get from their ad spend.…