Redfin

3 Lessons to Succeed as a New Software Engineer

Two years into industry, a former new grad reflects on the lessons learned as a new software engineer.

PostgreSQL EXPLAIN Explained

When a SQL statement is sent to a PostgreSQL server for execution, Postgres will decipher various parts of the query and define an execution plan in an attempt to retrieve and manipulate that data in…

Micro-Frontends Are Remote UI Components

When I first read the definition of micro-frontends, I didn’t “get it.” Specifically, when I read Cam Jackson’s article on martinfowler.com and Michael Geers’ mini-site micro-frontends.org, I was…

Node Modules at War: Why CommonJS and ES Modules Can’t Get Along

In Node 14, there are now two kinds of scripts: there are old-style CommonJS (CJS) scripts and new-style ESM scripts (aka MJS). CJS scripts use require() and module.exports; ESM scripts use import…

How to Boost PostgreSQL Cache Performance

When thinking about caching data for incredibly fast retrieval, technologies like Redis and Memcached often come to a developer’s mind. I, however, want to discuss a less commonly acknowledged cache…

Coding with Tomorrow’s STEM Leaders in San Francisco

Redfin’s San Francisco office was thrilled to welcome 23 students from Everett Middle School for a visit earlier this month. The students were on a field trip with IGNITE Worldwide, a nonprofit that…

Why Redfin Is Opening a Dallas Engineering Office

Since 2006, Redfin has had engineering offices in two locations: Seattle and San Francisco. Having multiple locations with different composition of teams and roles allows Redfin to attract a wider…

You Can Cheat When Fixing HTML Accessibility in Legacy Code

I’ve been spending the last month or so updating some legacy HTML to support screen readers. Screen-reader software can read a web page aloud, allowing visually impaired users to understand and…

Redfin Engineering Led an Hour of Code Event at Local Schools

Redfin recently led an event to give back to the community and provide our engineers an opportunity for team building. During a single day of the 2018 Computer Science Education Week, groups of…

Redfin Engineering Led an Hour of Code Event at Local Schools

Redfin recently led an event to give back to the community and provide our engineers an opportunity for team building. During a single day of the 2018 Computer Science Education Week, groups of…

My Redfin Internship

As someone who was born and raised in California, avocados are staple food. On my first day of internship, after meeting all the interns, my amazing team (Agent Efficiency #AE), and a few other…

My Redfunternship

As a college student, the pressure of finding an internship and figuring out what you want to do with your life can be consuming. While I don’t think this pressure ever truly goes away, I do think…

Interning on Homies

On Wednesday January 17th, at about 3:30 p.m., I got a call from Redfin saying that I’d received an offer to intern on the Homes Discovery team. A few minutes later, I hung up the call and proceeded…

From Zero to Hero!

Spending my summer working at Redfin as a Software Developer Intern was an incredible experience, the culture of the company and the people are one of the best I’ve had in my professional life…

Two Learnings and One Unlearning

The responsibility! I’ve heard the spiel “you will work on meaningful engineering projects” far too many times at career fairs, but it is real at Redfin. Quirky. Diverse. Authentic. Redfin has been…

Am I going to be spending my whole summer making a button faster?

When I found out that I was going to be working for the Performance Engineering team at Redfin, my first thought was “Am I going to be spending my whole summer making a button faster?” To my…

Interning at Redfin

Nine months ago, I got on a call with my future manager to talk about the scope of the team and understand if it’d be a good fit. Owner Engagement focuses on making Redfin resourceful for homeowners…

Oops! We Just Spammed Our Customers!

Redfin is a full-service real estate brokerage that uses technology to help our customers buy and sell homes. Our Notifications team owns listing-update emails, which we send to customers when a…

Slack Is Awful*

I spent a year as a developer working remotely, from a home office. I quickly learned to appreciate how much I could do when I focused on a problem without other folks around. I visited the office…

Fighting Adult Content with Kafka, Samza, and Google Safe Search

We faced the immediate problem of needing to maintain the integrity of our public-facing content - filtering out adult images and the like - and we used Kafka, Samza, and Google Safe Search to do it.

Google Doesn’t Have the Guts to Make Page Speed Actually Matter

Google uses hundreds of different factors (“signals”) to decide which web pages to show at the top of Google Search results. In January, Google announced that in July 2018, page speed will be a…

10 Things Your Engineering Manager Wishes You Knew

There’s this recurring feature of Reader’s Digest that I enjoy. Every month they have an article titled “Things your <foo> wishes you knew,” and then they have these quotes from some profession…

Ask Engineering Interview Candidates to Explain Something

Interviewing engineers is a hard problem. Every interviewing technique has vocal detractors who say, “I would never work at a company that used that interviewing technique.” Whiteboarding, take-home…

Open Source for Open Houses

At Redfin, we send millions of emails and push notifications per day to customers searching for new homes. These notifications tell users about real estate events that are relevant to them, such as…

We Played Games at the Office All Day and All Night for Charity

On November 4, 2017, four brave Redfin engineers descended upon HQ to game for 24 hours for charity. Through it all, we were able to raise $1,000 for the Children’s Miracle Network of Hospitals…

Say “No” to Your Manager

If you’re anything like me, you feel guilty when you can’t give people what they want. Either you’ve been beaten down by the patriarchy, or you’re a soft-hearted soul who just wants to see the people…

How to Replace Google’s AMP Without Slowing It Down

A lot of people hate AMP, and now that Google has announced AMP for email, the AMP haters are out in force again, and understandably so. 1) The URL of AMP pages is wrong. It points to google.com…

2017: A Redfin Engineering Year in Review

How Redfin upgraded its architecture and engineering process in 2017. Highlights include: build improvements, React Native, security training, and diversity.