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.
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Sources
That Which We CAN Do: Sustainability in a World of AI
As computing use grows, so does its environmental footprint. While hardware and software have become significantly more efficient, AI demand is growing even faster, outpacing those efficiency gains and increasing the ove…
Kafka App? There’s a Skill for That
Etsy is home to over 100 million listings from 5.6 million active sellers. Because the items for sale are unique and creative, there is no standard product catalog that tells us what they are. When someone searches for “…
Shaping Product Understanding with Contrastive Reinforcement Learning
Etsy’s marketplace is defined by the creativity and craftsmanship of our sellers and the hundreds of millions of highly diverse products they offer. You can find silversmiths who cold-forge recycled sterling silver, weav…
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…
How Etsy Uses LLMs to Improve Search Relevance
Ever searched for something specific, only to be met with results that are close, but not quite ? On Etsy’s Search Relevance team, that frustration is exactly what we are tackling. Our goal is simple yet ambitious: to he…
Reducing experiment duration with predicted control variates
I n 2021, we published a blog post titled “ Increasing experimentation accuracy and speed by using control variates ,” describing how we reduce the variance of metrics using CUPED in our experimentation platform. This is…
Improving performance by prefetching product pages from Etsy Search
Rarely are there opportunities for big, bold, game-changing improvements in web performance. The Speculation Rules API (SRA) is a recent browser development that offers just such an opportunity. This post details a joint…
Understanding Etsy’s Vast Inventory with LLMs
For more than 20 years, Etsy has been the destination for human creativity online. Our marketplace is home to more than 100 million special items made, handpicked and designed by more than 5 million sellers. These items…
Unlocking Faster Insights with Experimenter-Defined Segmentations
Imagine you have a fabulous idea to drive more sales on Etsy by giving out free ice cream with every purchase. How would you know if it will actually work? One way to test this out is to run an experiment ! An experiment…
Building Etsy Buyer Profiles with LLMs
Every day, shoppers from Etsy's community of nearly 90M buyers visit our marketplace to search for unique, handmade, and vintage items. But with over 100 million listings, how do we help each buyer find exactly what they…
Context engineering case studies: Etsy-specific question answering
This post investigates the benefits and limitations of prompt engineering in two instances of AI-assisted onboarding relying on large language model (LLM) technology. Of particular interest is how truthful (and therefore…
Behind the Scenes - A Glimpse into Tax Calculations
In the past, sellers were responsible for managing and fulfilling their own tax obligations. However, more and more jurisdictions are now requiring marketplaces such as Etsy to collect the tax from buyers and remit the t…
Adopting Jetpack Compose for Etsy’s Android App
One of our Guiding Principles at Etsy is that we “commit to our craft.” This means that we have a culture of learning, in which we’re constantly looking for opportunities to improve and learn, adopt industry best practic…
Machine Learning in Content Moderation at Etsy
At Etsy, we’re focused on elevating the best of our marketplace to help creative entrepreneurs grow their businesses. We continue to invest in making Etsy a safe and trusted place to shop, so sellers’ extraordinary items…
Enhancing Cloud Usage Forecasting, Monitoring & Optimizing
In 2020, Etsy concluded its migration from an on-premise data center to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). During this transition, a dedicated team of program managers ensured the migration's success. Post-migration, this…
Efficient Visual Representation Learning And Evaluation
Etsy features a diverse marketplace of unique handmade and vintage items. It’s a visually diverse marketplace as well, and computer vision has become increasingly important to Etsy as a way of enhancing our users’ shoppi…
Macramé: Untangling the Knot on the Etsy Android Listing Screen
Easily the most important and complex screen in the Buy on Etsy Android app is the listing screen, where all key information about an item for sale in the Etsy marketplace is displayed to buyers. Far from just a title an…
How We Built The Deals Tab in Swift UI
Balancing Engineering Ambition with Product Realism Introduction In July of 2023, Etsy’s App Updates team, responsible for the Updates feed in Etsy’s mobile apps, set off with an ambitious goal: to revamp the Updates tab…
The AR Measuring Box: Etsy's answer to Big Tape Measure
A little while ago, Etsy introduced a new feature in its iOS app that could place Etsy sellers' artwork on a user's wall using Apple's Augmented Reality (AR) tools. It let them visualize how a piece would look in their s…
The So-fine Real-time ML Paradigm
Introduction Each year, Etsy hosts an event known as “CodeMosaic” - an internal hackathon in which Etsy admin propose and build bold advances quickly in our technology across a number of different themes. People across E…
Leveraging Real-Time User Actions to Personalize Etsy Ads
Introduction Personalization is vital to connect our unique marketplace to the right buyer at the right time. Etsy has recently introduced a novel, general approach to personalizing ML models based on encoding and learni…