Nextdoor

Let AI Entertain You: Increasing User Engagement with Generative AI and Rejection Sampling

Generative AI (Gen AI) has demonstrated proficiency in content generation but does not consistently guarantee user engagement, mainly for two reasons. First, Gen AI generates content without…

From Pre-trained to Fine-tuned: Nextdoor’s Path to Effective Embedding Applications

The majority of ML models at Nextdoor are typically driven by a large number of features that are primarily either continuous or discrete in nature. The personalized features usually stem from…

Securing Diversity in Cybersecurity

At Nextdoor we build technology that empowers resilient, safe, and kind neighborhoods all over the world. Securing a product that empowers global communities requires diverse and inclusive teams…

Catching Anomalies Early in Mobile App Releases

At Nextdoor, our mobile applications on iOS and Android serve content to tens of millions of weekly active users. At this scale, we run a weekly release process for both iOS and Android, shipping…

Typeahead Search at Nextdoor

In a thriving community, people are connected to their friends and local businesses. Nextdoor is the hyperlocal platform that mirrors these offline relationships. Every day, through active…

Modernizing Nextdoor Search Stack — Part 2

In our last blog post of the Modernizing Nextdoor Search Stack series, we explained the Query Understanding and the ML models that power our Query Understanding Engine. We also covered the nuances of…

Using predictive technology to foster constructive conversations

Nextdoor’s purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on. We want to give neighbors ways to connect and be kind to each other, online and in real life. One…

Launch Control at Nextdoor

In this article, we share our experience building Launch Control, Nextdoor’s combined feature flagging and experiment configuration tool. One of Nextdoor’s core values is “Experiment and Learn…

Learn DevOps by Doing

A tricky problem and chipping away at "what do DevOps engineers do?"

Engineering Principles (v1) at Nextdoor

At Nextdoor, the written version of these engineering principles is new; however, the principles themselves are not. These principles developed from within Nextdoor’s values, our purpose, how we’ve…

Automated code generation from GraphQL operations

At Nextdoor, we’re constantly iterating our frontend web product to give neighbors the best experience, often releasing new versions with significant code changes multiple times per day. Two of the…

Nextdoor Notifications: How we use ML to keep neighbors informed

At Nextdoor, we help neighbors, small businesses, large brands, and public agencies create trusted connections and exchange helpful information, goods, and services. One of the top reasons neighbors…

Modernizing Our Search Stack

Neighbors all over the world turn to Nextdoor and look for local information through explicit queries in the search bar. Neighbors use the search bar to connect with other neighbors, find business…

Running ML Inference Services in Shared Hosting Environments

The CoreML team had the pleasure of presenting ‘Running ML Inference Services in Shared Hosting Environments’ at MLOps: Machine Learning in Production Bay Area Virtual Conference. This presentation…

Metablocks: Our Journey to an Agglomerated Navigation Logic

In this piece, we will explain our journey through solving fragmented navigation logic across different platforms by developing a backend-driven navigation system that helps users build flows. As…

Intro to Data Science & Analytics at Nextdoor

What type of data scientist are you? someone will say “I’m a data scientist…” and what they’ll actually mean is: statistician / production-level model builder / ETL whiz / analytics-driven product strategist and more! So what is a Data Scientist at Nextdoor?

Our iOS CI/CD Journey At Nextdoor

Two of the most useful tools for making software development run smoothly are CI & CD. Over the years our stack has evolved from a humble Jenkins box into a cloud-native platform. In this post we’ll…

Meet the Interns —  Summer 2020

This summer was unlike any other. With the pandemic, there was uncertainty about whether our internship program would be possible. After some major work across multiple teams, we were beyond excited…

Sitevars¹ at Nextdoor — How engineers quickly push configuration changes in production

Nextdoor engineers are always looking for ways to move faster. Making changes quickly and safely allows us to deliver more value to our members in neighborhoods around the globe, as well as to…

Accessibility @ Nextdoor

Nextdoor is the neighborhood hub where you can share information and communicate with your neighborhood. We want our platform to be broadly accessible, and have implemented features to help…

Data Migrations Don’t Have to Come with Downtime

At Nextdoor we invest heavily in Redis, a highly-performant in-memory datastore, to power many of our services by providing low latency access to data. Today, we own a dozen different instances of…

R3 2019: 48 hours to Reflect, Refine and Reinvent Nextdoor

R3 is an annual event to Reflect, Refine and Reinvent Nextdoor. R3 goes beyond a hackathon by being more of an idea-thon. Everyone in the company, from engineers to sales to Neighborhood Operations…

The Kindness Reminder

Neighbors in 11 countries communicate on Nextdoor. When a comment is reported, volunteer moderators (Nextdoor Leads) vote democratically to determine whether the communication was unkind. As a…

What is the technology behind Nextdoor in 2019?

(this post is adapted from an earlier article: https://engblog.nextdoor.com/what-is-the-technology-behind-nextdoor-5b74b3efcc31) How do we do this? Keep reading for a behind-the-scenes look into how…

Topic tagging for posts on Nextdoor using Machine Learning

Topics are spaces on Nextdoor where members can have conversations with neighbors who share common interests. We have many curated Topics, each with its own feed, where members can participate in…

Meet the Interns — Fall 2018

Every summer and fall at Nextdoor, we have a new class of interns that join us. They work on teams according to their interests, experience, prior knowledge, and how they want to grow and build out…

How 72 lines of code can impact your company culture

I wrote a small script for a Slack bot to help ping pong players find partners and keep track of their scores. As a side effect - the number of people playing went way up! Here's why.

Our Product Development Principles

At Nextdoor, we build products that help create stronger, safer neighborhoods all over the world. From listening to our members, to designing new features and engineering the best solutions, our…

Meet the Interns — Spring 2018

This spring, we were fortunate to have four awesome interns join the Nextdoor team. Our spring interns typically take a semester off of school to spend their time fully-immersed in our HQ office…

Challenges of monitoring sparse data, and what to do about it.

Whether you’re starting a new company or adding a new feature in your existing product, I strongly recommend adding metric monitoring early on to both your engineering as well as product data…

Summary of 22 product-engineering patterns that college didn’t teach me

Working at Nextdoor, I’m always surrounded by super talented people. Many of our early employees and founders came from companies like Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter. Coming to…

3 Hard Lessons from Scaling Continuous Deployment to a Monolith with 70+ Engineers

Like many successful tech startups (Instagram, Slack, New Relic, and many more) a large portion of Nextdoor is a monolithic application. While we’ve also created a significant number of microservices…

Meet the Interns — Spring 2017 Edition

At Nextdoor, few things get us more excited than the arrival of a new class of interns. In addition to being incredibly talented, our interns bring much more than technical contributions to Nextdoor…

Ditch your bucket of scripts for a tool belt

If you’re like us at Nextdoor, you have a lot of scripts that do a lot of useful things. Maybe, like us, you have some wiki pages that tells you the full path names of these scripts and the…