We often hear about the importance of exchanging knowledge and practices between different teams. However, less often do we hear concrete suggestions for how to do it. In this article, we discuss one of our practices to address the problem.| blog.allegro.tech
Training Machine Learning models on big data isn’t just about fitting the model itself — it’s about efficiency at every stage of the process. While much attention is given to optimizing model training itself, the earlier phases can be just as, if not more, critical to the overall performance. In this article, we take a deep dive into what happens before we actually invoke model.fit(), focusing on the data pivoting stage. We are taking you on a journey through various pivoting solutions,...| blog.allegro.tech
In this blogpost we want to introduce the topic of using a Large Language Model (LLM) as an evaluator — a novel approach to tackling the complexities of evaluating advanced machine learning systems, particularly in tasks like Automatic Summarization, Text Generation, and Machine Translation, where traditional metrics struggle to capture nuances like cross-lingual accuracy and bias detection.| blog.allegro.tech
This article discusses the dual-use dilemma of AI, focusing on China’s approach and the challenges of balancing innovation with security risks, particularly the blurred lines between civilian and military applications.| blog.allegro.tech
When we think about the Circuit Breaker pattern, we instantly associate it with the HTTP client. Just make some annotation or wrapper and proceed with coding. In this article, I will encourage you to use this pattern to resolve business problems. Based on a live example from Allegro I will show you how to use the implementation of CircuitBreaker from Resilience4j library for cases other than HTTP calls.| blog.allegro.tech
Did you know that in October this year, DRY principle will celebrate its 25th anniversary? It was proposed by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas in The Pragmatic Programmer book in 1999. 25th birthday is quite a good reason to celebrate, isn’t it? At least, it’s a good opportunity to bring this principle back into the spotlight and to discuss how to use it properly.| blog.allegro.tech
Hi, I am Magda and I will tell you a story about coming back to work after a break of 21 months and 2 days. Everything here will be a subjective perspective about my experience.| blog.allegro.tech
Are you, as a test automation engineer, tired of Selenium’s flakiness? Are you seeking a better tool to automate your end-to-end tests? Have you heard of Playwright? Perhaps you’ve encountered opinions that it is only worth using within a Node.js environment. I have. And as a tester, I decided to verify if this is true. If you’re interested in the results, I encourage you to read the following article.| blog.allegro.tech
This article is a case study of how we improved stability in our critical application. It’s mostly a technical analysis of what happens in fresh Java based instance, how JIT Compiler toyed with us at application start and how we learned to control it.| blog.allegro.tech
If you have experience with Event Storming and have ever found yourself wishing there was a way to document the insights gathered during a session, or wanting to communicate the process to other team members, then I have a solution for you. This idea can be expressed in a famous saying: One picture is worth more than a thousand words.| blog.allegro.tech
Site performance is very important, first of all, from the perspective of users, who expect a good experience when visiting the site. The user should not wait too long for the page to load. We all know how annoying it can be when we want to press an element and it jumps to another place on the page or when we click on a button and then nothing happens for a very long time. The state of a site’s performance in these aspects is measured by Web Vitals performance metrics and most importantly b...| blog.allegro.tech
In this article we’ll present methods for efficiently optimizing physical resources and fine-tuning the configuration of a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Dataflow pipeline in order to achieve cost reductions. Optimization will be presented as a real-life scenario, which will be performed in stages.| blog.allegro.tech
One tech blog/newsletter gained traction and popularity for a couple of years now: Pragmatic Engineer.| blog.allegro.tech
This story shows our journey in addressing a platform stability issue related to autoscaling, which, paradoxically, added some additional overhead instead of reducing the load. A pivotal part of this narrative is how we used Couchbase — a distributed NoSQL database. If you find yourself intrigued by another enigmatic story involving Couchbase, don’t miss my blog post on tuning expired doc settings.| blog.allegro.tech
At Allegro, we use Kafka as a backbone for asynchronous communication between microservices. With up to 300k messages published and 1M messages consumed every second, it is a key part of our infrastructure. A few months ago, in our main Kafka cluster, we noticed the following discrepancy: while median response times for produce requests were in single-digit milliseconds, the tail latency was much worse. Namely, the p99 latency was up to 1 second, and the p999 latency was up to 3 seconds. This...| blog.allegro.tech
Have you ever thought about ways of reducing repetitive, monotonous tasks? Maybe you would like to try to automate your own tasks? I will show you what technology we use at Allegro, what processes we have automated, and how to do it on your own.| blog.allegro.tech
This story shows how we strive to fix issues reported by our customers regarding inconsistent listing views on our e-commerce platform. We will use a top-down manner to guide you through our story. At the beginning, we highlight the challenges faced by our customers, followed by presenting basic information on how views are personalized on our web application. We then delve deeper into our internal architecture, aiming to clarify how it supports High Availability (HA) by using two data center...| blog.allegro.tech
Ready to turn web accessibility from a headache into a breeze? Join us as we demystify WCAG, explore its latest 2.2 version, and gaze into the future of digital inclusivity. Get ready for a journey that’s as enlightening as it is entertaining!| blog.allegro.tech
Icons are an integral part of most modern UIs. What is the best way to embed icons nowadays?| blog.allegro.tech
The idea for this article arose during a meeting where we learned that our supervisor would be leaving the company to pursue new opportunities. In response, a colleague lamented that what we would miss most is the knowledge departing with the leader. Unfortunately, that’s how it goes. Not only do we lose a colleague, but we also lose valuable knowledge and experience. However, this isn’t a story about my supervisor; it’s a story about all those individuals who are experts in their field...| blog.allegro.tech
