December, 2015

article thumbnail

Hack Week #4: Let’s Talk About Code, Baby!

Zalando Engineering

Zalando’s many tech-driven projects and initiatives — from logistics to customer care to marketing analysis — are cross-departmental. To help our thousands of non-tech employees better understand our many tech topics and terms, one of our Hack Week teams created a training program called Let’s Talk About Code, Baby. The project aims to help us all to better understand each other and create a more collaborative environment.

Coding 52
article thumbnail

Recap of Hadoop News for November

ProjectPro

News on Hadoop – November 2015 2nd Generation Hadoop has become the most critical cloud applications platform, Nov 2, 2015, TechRepublic.com Hadoop version of 1.0 was specifically designed for application processing to support use cases of batch processing. Hadoop second generation is designed to support real time applications where Hadoop is used not just as a storage system but as an application platform.

Hadoop 52
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Hack Week #4: Zinder

Zalando Engineering

Seven members of Zalando’s Helsinki team (“Zelsinkis”) meet at the Helsinki airport on a Sunday afternoon. It doesn’t take long for the first challenge to hit us in the face — or feet, I should say. Our airline decides to change our departure gate, and we’re on the other side of the airport. Gotta love it. Got to RUN! Our team — five engineers, one producer (that’s me!

Scala 52
article thumbnail

Hack Week #4: Turn it up to Eleven

Zalando Engineering

Hack Week is not all about coding, innovating and working hard. Throughout the week we’ve hosted parties and side events to help the teams really let their hair down and relax. The theme of Hack Week #4 is Rockstarz, so we’ve organized lots of Rock n’ Roll-themed activities. Since Monday, our Rockbandz competition has run daily at lunchtime in Berlin and Dortmund.

IT 52
article thumbnail

From Developer Experience to Product Experience: How a Shared Focus Fuels Product Success

Speaker: Anne Steiner and David Laribee

As a concept, Developer Experience (DX) has gained significant attention in the tech industry. It emphasizes engineers’ efficiency and satisfaction during the product development process. As product managers, we need to understand how a good DX can contribute not only to the well-being of our development teams but also to the broader objectives of product success and customer satisfaction.

article thumbnail

Hack Week #4: From Dublin to Dortmund

Zalando Engineering

Hack Week #4 is the first for most of us who work in Zalando’s Fashion Insights Centre in Dublin, which opened earlier this year. Our crew has heard a lot about how fun and creative past HWs in Berlin have been; with all the stories of space shoe launches , parties, and other historic moments capturing our imaginations, it’s no wonder that all of our lunch conversations over the past few weeks have focused on our hacking plans.

Project 52
article thumbnail

Hack Week #4: #DortmundWillHackThis

Zalando Engineering

With our transformation from fashion retailer into fashion platform , our amazing business success, and our implementation of Radical Agility , Zalando Tech has grown exponentially in 2015. Nearly 900 technologists work from seven different locations : Berlin (tech headquarters), Dortmund, Mönchengladbach, Erfurt, Hamburg, Dublin and Helsinki. With such a huge team, we’ve had to open a second Hack Week location for the first time in Hack Week history.

Retail 52

More Trending

article thumbnail

Hack Week #4: Hacking for Social Good

Zalando Engineering

Zalando technologists use their skills and expertise for social good all year round — including Hack Week. Some of our teams have been spending the past week working on projects that address particular social needs. Let’s take a look at a few of them! “The Refugee Clothing Points” App Clothing is one of the greatest needs faced by the large number of refugees entering Germany from the Middle East.

Food 40
article thumbnail

Hack Week #4: The Knitting Machine

Zalando Engineering

Buy an old knitting machine from the 1980s and turn it into a yarn-based printer! This is what one of our Hack Week teams has done — producing the latest knitted fashions, geek-style! Their key ingredients: some online shopping luck, a few tutorials on how to operate the machine, an Arduino Uno , and the open source hard- and software from All Yarns Are Beautiful.

IT 40
article thumbnail

Hack Week #4: Hack Week How-To

Zalando Engineering

Five days, 100 projects, 900 participants: Hack Week #4 is our biggest and most international edition yet! I asked two members of our organizing committee (aka “the Orga Crew”) — Ellen Nagel (Manager Executive Projects and Culture) and Bastian Gerhard (Head of Innovation & Enablement) how to throw a successful Hack Week of this scope and size. If you’ve ever thought about organizing your own similar event, read on.

BI 40
article thumbnail

Hack Week #4: Onboarding Goes Hack Week!

Zalando Engineering

What if you’ve just moved from Amsterdam to Berlin to join Zalando, and are now in desperate need of information about life and the bureaucratic jungle in your new home country? If you’re Backend Engineer Daniel Franke, you take a pragmatic approach and create Zalando Concierge: an onboarding app that aims to make life for Zalando newbies as easy as possible.

article thumbnail

Peak Performance: Continuous Testing & Evaluation of LLM-Based Applications

Speaker: Aarushi Kansal, AI Leader & Author and Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO at Aggregage

Software leaders who are building applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often find it a challenge to achieve reliability. It’s no surprise given the non-deterministic nature of LLMs. To effectively create reliable LLM-based (often with RAG) applications, extensive testing and evaluation processes are crucial. This often ends up involving meticulous adjustments to prompts.

article thumbnail

Hack Week #4: Building the Best Conference App

Zalando Engineering

Nowadays it’s common for tech conferences to offer their own event-specific apps with schedules, location information, and other essential details. While convenient, these apps are often sub-optimal — buggy and slow, even for the most prestigious tech events. So with this in mind, one of our Hack Week teams is aiming to build a high-performance event app for Zalando.

article thumbnail

Hack Week #4: Awards

Zalando Engineering

Yesterday I caught up with Bastian Gerhard : Zalando’s esteemed Head of Innovation and Enablement, Hack Week organizer/old hand, and 2015 project judge. I asked him about our award categories and judging processes. Hi, Bastian! Thanks for taking the time to talk. Can you enlighten me on the judging process? Sure. What do you want to know? Well, firstly: How did you select the judging panels?

Project 40
article thumbnail

Accelerating Warehouse Operations with Neural Networks

Zalando Engineering

Recent advances in deep learning have enabled research and industry to master many challenges in computer vision and natural language processing that were out of reach until just a few years ago. Yet computer vision and natural language processing represent only the tip of the iceberg of what is possible. In this article, I will demonstrate how my colleagues Dr.

article thumbnail

One Last Thing Before We Call It a Year: Hack Week #4

Zalando Engineering

It’s Hack Week time! Our annual week of open innovation and experimentation takes place December 14-18 in our Berlin and Dortmund tech offices and features more participants (+900) from more locations (seven) than ever before. To celebrate our team’s growth and accomplishments over the past year — and to look forward to an even more electrifying, headbanging-worthy 2016 — the theme of Hack Week #4 is “rock stars”!

IT 40
article thumbnail

How to Build an Experimentation Culture for Data-Driven Product Development

Speaker: Margaret-Ann Seger, Head of Product, Statsig

Experimentation is often seen as an aspirational practice, especially at smaller, fast-moving companies who are strapped for time and resources. So, how can you get your team making decisions in a more data-driven way while continuing to remain lean and maintaining ship velocity? In this webinar, Margaret-Ann Seger, Head of Product at Statsig, will teach you how to build an experimentation culture from the ground-up, graduating from just getting started with data-driven development to operating

article thumbnail

Video: Reactive RESTful APIs with Akka HTTP and Slick

Zalando Engineering

Zalando engineers are currently rebuilding our “shop” — the unit that includes our 15 country-specific, customer-facing websites—to transform it from a monolith into microservices. As part of this work, we've developed open-source tools like Innkeeper : a simple, RESTful route management API built on top of reactive technologies like Akka HTTP and Slick.

article thumbnail

Video: “Scala Microservices at Zalando”

Zalando Engineering

Zalando technologists have been using Scala in production since 2014, when we began transforming our monolithic architecture into microservices. Much of our Scala development is done by the engineers in our Brand Solutions department, which builds products and services to support Zalando’s brand-partners. At the October meetup of SF Scala , the primary Scala meetup group in San Francisco, Brand Solutions Delivery Lead Alexander Kops gave a brief talk describing his teams’ ongoing Scala efforts.

Scala 40
article thumbnail

Mobile Trends for 2016

Zalando Engineering

Shopping straight from social media Social platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest, came up with the “Buy Button” this year so users can shop selected items without leaving the respective social platform. Mobile users spend most of their time on social apps, and according to Nielsen this is around 85% of their time. This offers customers a convenient way to order their favorite items straight away.

article thumbnail

Building System Packages from Python Modules (with Dependencies Included)

Zalando Engineering

In our last post on packaging , my colleague Felix Mueller talked about why it’s good to manage all your software with your system’s native package management tools. He also discussed how to build packages in an automated, consistent way. Now I’d like to describe the benefits of wrapping Python’s virtualenvs in system packages. Why is it particularly useful to package and ship Python modules as native system packages?

Python 40
article thumbnail

Entity Resolution Checklist: What to Consider When Evaluating Options

Are you trying to decide which entity resolution capabilities you need? It can be confusing to determine which features are most important for your project. And sometimes key features are overlooked. Get the Entity Resolution Evaluation Checklist to make sure you’ve thought of everything to make your project a success! The list was created by Senzing’s team of leading entity resolution experts, based on their real-world experience.