Статья

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 help buyers find exactly what they’re looking for, and to help sellers reach the people seeking their special products. Search plays a central role in that mission. Historically, Etsy’s search models have relied heavily on engagement signals – such as clicks, add-to-carts, and purchases – as proxies for relevance. These signals are objective, but they can also be biased: popular

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

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 has grown significantly: combined, these tables have over 425 TB of data and receive roughly 1.7 million requests per second. Etsy engineers access our MySQL data through a proprietary object-relational mapping (ORM). The ORM has a corresponding model for each MySQL table. When a table is sharded, its rows are partitioned among different databases known as shards. Each shard has

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

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, which is built on a multitask learning foundation, is the critical link in this connection. Recently, we identified an opportunity to drive more meaningful buyer engagement by enhancing our model’s ability to predict purchase intent. We achieved this via a dual-pronged improvement: introducing Multigate Mixture of Experts (MMoE) to our model architecture and leveraging add-to-

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

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, weavers who dye raw fleece with indigo and black walnut, and ceramicists who throw stoneware on a kick wheel. These details define each product and often determine whether it matches a buyer’s taste, style, and interests. Sometimes buyers know exactly what they want, searching for “hand-thrown ceramic mug” or “vegetable-tanned leather wallet.” Other times, especially in recommendat

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

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 “light linen dress for summer,” our models must infer what the shopper means and what the listings contain. They do that using data from user visits and Etsy listings. We use Kafka for streaming data. These data streams provide fresh features and embeddings that power our machine learning models. If a shopper favorites a hand-painted ceramic mug, that action can shape their reco

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

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 overall environmental impact of computing. What’s more, measurement standards are still playing catch up, making it difficult for companies to measure and reduce their environmental impact. We’ve grappled with this challenge for years (starting with cloud computing and now AI), and we know we’re not alone. Environmental impact has been growing exponentially as computational power

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

GitLab Critical Patch Release: 19.5.1, 19.4.3, 19.3.6, 19.2.9, 19.1.9, 19.0.10, 18.11.13

GitLab

PHP2Shell: GitLab helps find and remediate critical PHP flaws

GitLab is not affected by PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619). The GitLab application is not written in PHP and does not run it to serve web requests, and our Security team has found no evidence of impact to GitLab-managed infrastructure. GitLab.com, GitLab Self-Managed, and GitLab Dedicated are not impacted. PHP is a widely used programming language that runs on web servers and powers popular platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Magento, so a flaw in PHP itself can affect many websites and applications. On October 21, 2026, the PHP project fixed two critical remote code execution

GitLab · EN

Pillow CVE-2026-112900: How to find and fix it with GitLab

GitLab is not affected by CVE-2026-112900 or the other vulnerabilities fixed in Pillow 13.0.0. GitLab products do not include the Pillow library, and our Security team has found no evidence of impact to GitLab-managed infrastructure. GitLab.com, GitLab Self-Managed, and GitLab Dedicated are not impacted. Pillow is one of the most widely used image libraries in the Python ecosystem. It often sits several layers down in a dependency tree, pulled in by a web framework, a thumbnailing service or an ML toolkit that nobody chose it for directly. On October 16, 2026, the Pillow project released versi

GitLab · EN

Extend GitLab Duo Agent Platform into your business systems

Developers mostly use GitLab Duo Agent Platform where they already work: the IDE, merge requests, and issues. But DevSecOps teams also support the business systems the rest of the company runs on, and those systems break too. In Salesforce, for example, when a validation fails, a callout times out, or a null slips through a trigger, the error gets logged, but the log doesn’t explain the cause. An engineer still has to read the stack trace, find the class in the repository, check what changed recently, and decide whether this is a one-off or a regression. Meanwhile, the business user who hit th

GitLab · EN

What happens when vulnerabilities are discovered faster than you can fix them?

We're entering a new era of application security. Frontier AI models are uncovering complex flaws that traditional tools overlooked, and attackers are using the same models to exploit them faster. Remediation isn't keeping pace: Verizon's 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) measures the median time to fully remediate a known-exploited vulnerability at 43 days, up from 32 in 2025. Security teams are already stretched across growing application portfolios, third-party dependencies, and a steady stream of new disclosures. And while agents that find vulnerabilities and write fixes are be

GitLab · EN

GitLab Orbit: Find vulnerability blast radius without the manual hunt

A critical vulnerability needs a fix and a map. The fix is usually fast. Finding where the vulnerable component lives, who owns it, and whether it's exposed to the Internet is what costs you time. Most security teams piece that answer together from scanner reports, spreadsheets, and a Slack thread asking who owns a service nobody recognizes, and you stay exposed for every hour that takes. GitLab Orbit , now generally available , replaces this manual work with a single query. Orbit connects code, merge requests, pipelines, security findings, and ownership in one graph that stays current as your

GitLab · EN

GitLab Orbit is GA: Higher agent accuracy, lower token cost

An agent’s true cost isn’t only the tokens it burns. It’s the review that calls your code “safe to merge” after seeing the diff, but without any context on the pipeline. We call that artificial confidence, not artificial intelligence. Agents guess because code is all they can see; they can’t see the merge request that last changed it, the pipeline that ran it, the vulnerability it carries, or the people who wrote and reviewed it. Guessing is expensive. If you’ve tried running agents in a large monorepo, one with tens of thousands of files, you know how it goes: the agent iterates, pinging the

GitLab · EN

10 questions to ask any software vendor about sovereignty

Sovereignty is moving from buzzword to buying criterion. The European Commission’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) would set assurance levels for the cloud and AI services public authorities buy, defining where data should live and who can access it. Parts of it could reach private entities too. GitLab submitted its own comment on CADA because we share the goal of strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty and security. We believe this important work should prioritize customer control, portability, interoperability, provider diversity, and risk-based safeguards. You can also view

GitLab · EN

SLC-OE-08: Turning the Corner

Whew. What a year. But if you're reading this, you made it through! As we all move into a hopefully much better 2021, here are three things you can do to improve your experience as a photographer for the coming year. Read more »

Strobist · EN

SLC-2L-15: Cross-Pollination

Lighting with flash can give you more than just the ability to control the quality of your light. With the inherent consistency of light from (manual) flash, you can layer in slices of time as well. But first, you’ll want to lock down two things: the ambient light portion of your exposure, and your camera’s physical position. Read more »

Strobist · EN

Notes on the Paul Buff Link 800ws Flash

The Paul C. Buff Link monobloc studio strobe ($895.95) delivers 800ws of portable power, and deserves consideration from anyone in the United States who is considering a big gun for use on location. Please note: This is not a full review. There have been several thorough examples already published — most notably this one by Mike McGee. There are many others, from the usual suspects, a Google search away. Rather, this is a quick write-up of some first-hand impressions, thoughts and features I have not seen much mention of elsewhere. Read more »

Strobist · EN

iPhone Users: Put an AirTag in Your Camera Bag

Apple’s new AirTags are a straight-up gift for photographers. After testing one for the past couple of weeks, I’ll be hiding an AirTag in my scooter, one in my car and another one in my camera bag. Read more »

Strobist · EN

SLC-1L-13: Conservancy Critters

When lighting with small subjects, a speedlight is generally all you’ll ever need. Further, because of the scale and distances involved, even with a small flash you’ll be working at low power settings. For these photos of some of the resident animals at the Howard County Conservancy, we used a single speedlight generally at one-eighth power, and let the environment of the impromptu studio to the rest of the heavy lifting for light modification. Read more »

Strobist · EN

So Long (for Now!) and Thank You.

In 2006 I started a lighting blog while working full-time as a staffer at The Baltimore Sun. By early 2007, it became obvious that I didn't have the personal resources to give 100% to both Strobist and my job at the newspaper. That’s exactly the position I find myself in today. For the past year I have been working on a new project. It is photography-based, and will be as unique to the photo space as Strobist was back in 2006. But, as I found with Strobist in 2007, this project will require all of my focus. So I am shifting Strobist into archive mode to allow myself the time and mental space t

Strobist · EN

The Traveling Photographer’s Manifesto,Discounted for Strobist Readers

For fifteen years, this site focused on lighting. Before that, I worked as a newspaper photojournalist. Lighting was part of the job. So were access, preparation, and learning how to walk into unfamiliar situations and come back with something useful. Lighting solves technical problems. The harder problems are usually human. The Traveling Photographer’s Manifesto grows out of that larger frame. It’s not about flash. It’s not about gear. It’s about how to think when you’re working outside your comfort zone — whether that’s across the world or across town. The book is structured as 56 short chap

Strobist · EN

Travel Photography Is About People: How to Connect, Approach Strangers, and Make Photographs That Matter

For nineteen years, Strobist has been about light. This post is about the other thing, the bigger thing, the thing that took me forty years and ten thousand assignments to fully understand. The success or failure of a travel photographer is not decided by gear, and only partly by technique. It is decided by how well you connect with the people and places in front of your camera. This is the one post Strobist will ever need on travel photography. Everything below is the condensed version of what I now believe. What is The Traveling Photographer's Manifesto? The Traveling Photographer's Manifest

Strobist · EN

Honest Moments: Capturing Real Human Connection

The most technically perfect portrait in the world can feel empty if nothing real is happening in it. Real human connection photography isn’t about the right light or the right lens. It’s about what passes between people when they forget the camera is there: a glance, a laugh that hasn’t quite finished, a hand on a shoulder that says something no caption could. These moments exist constantly. Most photographers miss […] The post Honest Moments: Capturing Real Human Connection appeared first on 500px .

500px · EN

Eline Deckers: Black and White Street Photography in Antwerp | 500px Photographer Spotlight

Eline Deckers works in hard light and is not afraid of the dark. The Antwerp-based photographer shoots under the name Studio EDX, and she makes black-and-white street photography with the contrast turned all the way up. A figure in a wide-brimmed hat is reduced to a silhouette in a black alley. Commuters smear into ghosts under arched station windows. A man in a doorway is cut clean out of a […] The post Eline Deckers: Black and White Street Photography in Antwerp | 500px Photographer Spotlight appeared first on 500px .

500px · EN