How It's Made
How It's Made
Monte Carlo, Puppetry and Laughter: The Unexpected Joys of Prompt Engineering
Author: Ben Bader The universe of the current Large Language Models (LLMs) engineering is electrifying, to say the least. The industry has been on fire with change since the launch of ChatGPT in November of Last year. We’re all seeing the rise of AI tooling across the entire industry, and it’s opening up product and development possibilities at an astounding rate. Instacart has been adopting…...
Dec 19, 2023
How It's Made
Supercharging ML/AI Foundations at Instacart
By Haixun Wang and Jagannath Putrevu Machine Learning (ML) is one of the most impactful technology levers we have at Instacart to make our services better and help our customers, shoppers, retailers, and brand partners.…...
Aug 15, 2023
How It's Made
Zero-Downtime PostgreSQL Cutovers
Authors: Brad Nicholson, Andrew Tanner, Marco Montagna Instacart runs one of the largest PostgreSQL fleets on top of AWS RDS, and part of managing a fleet like this is to keep it up to date.…...
Jul 17, 2023
How It's Made
How Instacart Modernized the Prediction of Real Time Availability for Hundreds of Millions of Items While Saving Costs
This is Part 2 of a three-part blog post series in which we outline how we addressed inventory challenges through product, machine learning, and engineering innovations. See Part 1 here. Introduction At Instacart, we serve customers with…...
Jul 17, 2023
How It's Made
How Instacart’s Item Availability Evolved Over the Pandemic
This is the part-1 of a three-part blog post series in which we outline how we addressed inventory challenges through product, machine learning, and engineering innovations. A few years ago, we introduced the problem of predicting…...
Jul 10, 2023
How It's Made
How Instacart Measures the True Value of Advertising: The Methodology of Ad Incrementality
Author: Jason Kim In today’s highly competitive digital marketplace, understanding the true value of the advertising effort is no longer a luxury but a necessity. While there are many methodologies used to evaluate the effectiveness…...
Jun 30, 2023
How It's Made
Using Contextual Bandit models in large action spaces at Instacart
Authors: David Vengerov, Vinesh Gudla, Tejaswi Tenneti, Haixun Wang, Kourosh Hakhamaneshi At Instacart, we strive to provide our customers with the most personalized experience possible by combining multiple considerations they may have when searching for products on Instacart. These…...
Jun 15, 2023
How It's Made
Building a Flink Self-Serve Platform on Kubernetes at Scale
Author: Sylvia Lin At Instacart, we have a number of data pipelines with low-latency needs that handle over two trillion events a year. Those events help our engineering and product teams to make better decisions…...
Apr 28, 2023
How It's Made
Distributed Machine Learning at Instacart
How Instacart uses distributed Machine Learning to efficiently train thousands of models in production Author: Han Li At Instacart, we take pride in offering a diverse range of machine learning (ML) products that empower every…...
Mar 24, 2023
How It's Made
Adopting PgCat: A Nextgen Postgres Proxy
Authors: Mostafa Abdelraouf, Zain Kabani, Andrew Tanner In this post, we’ll be talking about PgCat, an open-source Postgresql Proxy that we have been using in production and contributing to. It provides connection pooling, load-balancing, and…...
Mar 13, 2023