How a One Line Change Decreased Our Clone Times by 99%

2,519
Pinterest
Pinterest's profile on StackShare is not actively maintained, so the information here may be out of date.

By Urvashi Reddy | Software Engineer, Engineering Productivity Team Adam Berry | Tech Lead, Engineering Productivity Team Rui Li | Software Engineer, Engineering Productivity Team


The Engineering Productivity team at Pinterest came across a small change that had a large impact in reducing build times across pipelines. We found that setting the refspec option during git fetch reduced our cloning step by 99%.

The Engineering Productivity team at Pinterest is responsible for supporting the engineers who build and deploy software at the company. Our team maintains a number of infrastructure services and often works on large scale efforts — migrating all software at Pinterest to Bazel, creating a Continuous Delivery platform called Hermez, and maintaining the monorepos that get committed to a few hundred times a day, to name a few.

All our larger efforts are designed to progress on the goal of making software development and delivery at Pinterest a fast and painless experience. Recently, we were reminded of how small details can also have a large impact on that goal. We discovered an overlooked Git option that significantly reduced the build times in our continuous integration pipelines. In order to understand how this small change had such a large impact, we need to share a little information on our monorepos and our pipelines.

Monorepos and Pipelines

We have six main repositories at Pinterest: Pinboard, Optimus, Cosmos, Magnus, iOS, and Android. Each one is a monorepo and houses a large collection of language-specific services. Pinboard is as old as the company and is the largest monorepo. Pinboard has more than 350K commits and is 20GB in size when cloned fully.

Cloning monorepos that have a lot of code and history is time consuming, and we need to do it frequently throughout the day in our continuous integration pipelines. For Pinboard alone, we do more than 60K git pulls on business days. Most of our Jenkins pipeline configuration scripts (written in Groovy) start with a “Checkout” stage where we clone the repository that the later stages will build and test. Here’s what a typical “Checkout” stage looks like:

If we were using the Git CLI directly, it would translate to:

Even though we’re telling Git to do a shallow clone, to not fetch any tags, and to fetch the last 50 commits, we’re still not running this operation as fast as we could be. That’s because we aren’t setting the refspec option. Notice that by not setting it in the pipeline configuration script, we’re telling Git to fetch all refspecs: +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*. In the case of Pinboard, that operation would be fetching more than 2,500 branches.

By simply adding the refspec option and specifying which refs we care about (master, in our case), we can limit the refs to the branch we care about and save a lot of time. Here’s what that looks like in our pipeline code:

This simple one line change reduced our clone times by 99% and significantly reduced our build times as a result. Cloning our largest repo, Pinboard went from 40 minutes to 30 seconds. It goes to show that sometimes our small efforts can have a big impact as well.

Learnings

Like most developer productivity teams, we work on large services that have a big impact on our day-to-day experience. However, it’s sometimes the one line fixes that can make a huge difference. Our work is about understanding that.

If you have a passion for improving developer productivity, join our team! We’re hiring for engineering roles on our Engineering Productivity team.

To learn more about Engineering at Pinterest, check out our Engineering Blog, and visit our StackShare page. To view and apply to open opportunities, visit our Careers page.

Pinterest
Pinterest's profile on StackShare is not actively maintained, so the information here may be out of date.
Tools mentioned in article
Open jobs at Pinterest
Backend Engineer, Core & Monetization
San Francisco, CA, US; , CA, US
<div class="content-intro"><p><strong>About Pinterest</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">:&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></p> <p>Millions of people across the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas every day. It’s where they get inspiration, dream about new possibilities and plan for what matters most. Our mission is to help those people find their inspiration and create a life they love.&nbsp;In your role, you’ll be challenged to take on work that upholds this mission and pushes Pinterest forward. You’ll grow as a person and leader in your field, all the while helping&nbsp;Pinners&nbsp;make their lives better in the positive corner of the internet.</p> <p><em>Our new progressive work model is called PinFlex, a term that’s uniquely Pinterest to describe our flexible approach to living and working. Visit our </em><a href="https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinflex/" target="_blank"><em><u>PinFlex</u></em></a><em> landing page to learn more.&nbsp;</em></p></div><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are looking for inquisitive, well-rounded Backend engineers to join our Core and Monetization engineering teams. Working closely with product managers, designers, and backend engineers, you’ll play an important role in enabling the newest technologies and experiences. You will build robust frameworks &amp; features. You will empower both developers and Pinners alike. You’ll have the opportunity to find creative solutions to thought-provoking problems. Even better, because we covet the kind of courageous thinking that’s required in order for big bets and smart risks to pay off, you’ll be invited to create and drive new initiatives, seeing them from inception through to technical design, implementation, and release.</span></p> <p><strong>What you’ll do:</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Build out the backend for Pinner-facing features to power the future of inspiration on Pinterest</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Contribute to and lead each step of the product development process, from ideation to implementation to release; from rapidly prototyping, running A/B tests, to architecting and building solutions that can scale to support millions of users</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Partner with design, product, and backend teams to build end-to-end functionality</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Put on your Pinner hat to suggest new product ideas and features</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Employ automated testing to build features with a high degree of technical quality, taking responsibility for the components and features you develop</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Grow as an engineer by working with world-class peers on varied and high impact projects</span></li> </ul> <p><strong>What we’re looking for:</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">2+ years of industry backend development experience, building consumer or business facing products</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Proficiency in common backend tech stacks for RESTful API, storage, caching and data processing</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience in following best practices in writing reliable and maintainable code that may be used by many other engineers</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ability to keep up-to-date with new technologies to understand what should be incorporated</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Strong collaboration and communication skills</span></li> </ul> <p><strong>Backend Core Engineering teams:</strong></p> <ul> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Community Engagement</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Content Acquisition &amp; Media Platform</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Core Product Indexing Infrastructure</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Shopping Catalog&nbsp;</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Trust &amp; Safety Platform</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Trust &amp; Safety Signals</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">User Understanding</span></li> </ul> <p><strong>Backend Monetization Engineering teams:&nbsp;</strong></p> <ul> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ads API Platform</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ads Indexing Platform</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ads Reporting Infrastructure</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ads Retrieval Infra</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ads Serving and ML Infra</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Measurement Ingestion</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Merchant Infra&nbsp;</span></li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. This position will pay a base salary of $145,700 to $258,700. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found at <a href="https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinterest-life/">https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinterest-life/</a>.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.</span></p> <p>#LI-CL5&nbsp;</p> <p>#LI-REMOTE</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><div class="content-conclusion"><p><strong>Our Commitment to Diversity:</strong></p> <p>At Pinterest, our mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love—and that includes our employees. We’re taking on the most exciting challenges of our working lives, and we succeed with a team that represents an inclusive and diverse set of identities and backgrounds.</p></div>
Engineering Manager, Advertiser Autom...
San Francisco, CA, US; , CA, US
<div class="content-intro"><p><strong>About Pinterest</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">:&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></p> <p>Millions of people across the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas every day. It’s where they get inspiration, dream about new possibilities and plan for what matters most. Our mission is to help those people find their inspiration and create a life they love.&nbsp;In your role, you’ll be challenged to take on work that upholds this mission and pushes Pinterest forward. You’ll grow as a person and leader in your field, all the while helping&nbsp;Pinners&nbsp;make their lives better in the positive corner of the internet.</p> <p><em>Our new progressive work model is called PinFlex, a term that’s uniquely Pinterest to describe our flexible approach to living and working. Visit our </em><a href="https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinflex/" target="_blank"><em><u>PinFlex</u></em></a><em> landing page to learn more.&nbsp;</em></p></div><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As the Engineering Manager of the Advertiser Automation team, you’ll be leading a large team that’s responsible for key systems that are instrumental to the performance of ad campaigns, tying machine learning models and other automation techniques to campaign creation and management. The ideal candidate should have experience leading teams that work across the web technology stack, be driven about partnering with Product and other cross-functional leaders to create a compelling vision and roadmap for the team, and be passionate about helping each member of their team grow.</span></p> <p><strong>What you’ll do:</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Managing a team of full-stack engineers</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Work closely with Product and Design on planning roadmap, setting technical direction and delivering value</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coordinate closely with XFN partners on multiple partner teams that the team interfaces with</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lead a team that’s responsible for key systems that utilize machine learning models to help advertisers create more performant campaigns on Pinterest</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Partner with Product Management to provide a compelling vision and roadmap for the team.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Work with PM and tech leads to estimate scope of work, define release schedules, and track progress.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mentor and develop engineers at various levels of seniority.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Keep the team accountable for hitting business goals and driving meaningful impact</span></li> </ul> <p><strong>What we’re looking for:</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our PinFlex future of work philosophy requires this role to visit a Pinterest office for collaboration approximately 1x per quarter. For employees not located within a commutable distance from this in-office touchpoint, Pinterest will cover T&amp;E. Learn more about PinFlex <a href="https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinflex/" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></em></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">1+ years of experience as an engineering manager (perf cycles, managing up/out, 10 ppl)</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">5+ years of software engineering experience as a hands on engineer</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience leading a team of engineers through a significant feature or product launch in collaboration with Product and Design</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Track record of developing high quality software in an automated build and deployment environment</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience working with both frontend and backend technologies</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Well versed in agile development methodologies</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ability to operate in a fast changing environment / comfortable with ambiguity</span></li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. This position will pay a base salary of $172,500 to $258,700. The position is also eligible for equity and incentive compensation. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found at </span><a href="https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinterest-life/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinterest-life/</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>#LI-REMOTE</p> <p>#LI-NB1</p><div class="content-conclusion"><p><strong>Our Commitment to Diversity:</strong></p> <p>At Pinterest, our mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love—and that includes our employees. We’re taking on the most exciting challenges of our working lives, and we succeed with a team that represents an inclusive and diverse set of identities and backgrounds.</p></div>
Engineering Manager, Conversion Data
Seattle, WA, US; , WA, US
<div class="content-intro"><p><strong>About Pinterest</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">:&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></p> <p>Millions of people across the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas every day. It’s where they get inspiration, dream about new possibilities and plan for what matters most. Our mission is to help those people find their inspiration and create a life they love.&nbsp;In your role, you’ll be challenged to take on work that upholds this mission and pushes Pinterest forward. You’ll grow as a person and leader in your field, all the while helping&nbsp;Pinners&nbsp;make their lives better in the positive corner of the internet.</p> <p><em>Our new progressive work model is called PinFlex, a term that’s uniquely Pinterest to describe our flexible approach to living and working. Visit our </em><a href="https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinflex/" target="_blank"><em><u>PinFlex</u></em></a><em> landing page to learn more.&nbsp;</em></p></div><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pinterest is one of the fastest growing online advertising platforms, and our continued success depends on our ability to enable advertisers to understand the value and return on their advertising investments. Conversion Data, a team within the Measurement org, is a Seattle engineering product team. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Conversion Data team is functioning as custodian of conversion data inside Pinterest. We build tools to make conversion data accessible and usable for consumers with valid business justifications. We are aiming to have conversion data consumed in a privacy-safe and secured way. By providing toolings and support, we reduce friction for consumers to stay compliant with upcoming privacy headwinds.&nbsp;</span></p> <p><strong>What you’ll do</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Manager for the Conversion Data team (5 FTE ICs and 3 contractors) which sits within the Measurement Data Foundations organization in Seattle.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Help to reinvent how conversion data can be utilized for downstream teams in the world while maintaining a high bar for Pinner privacy.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Work closely with cross functional partners in Seattle as measurement is a cross-company cutting initiative.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Drive both short term execution and long term engineering strategy for Pinterest’s conversion data products.</span></li> </ul> <p><strong>What we’re looking for:</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience managing product development teams, including working closely with PM and Product Design to identify, shape and grow successful products</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;">The ideal candidate will have experience with processing high volumes of data at a scale.</li> <li style="font-weight: 400;">Grit, desire to work in a team, for the betterment of all - correlates to the Pinterest value of “acts like an owner”</li> <li style="font-weight: 400;">2+ years EM experience</li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. This position will pay a base salary of $172,500 to $258,700. The position is also eligible for equity and incentive compensation. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found at </span><a href="https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinterest-life/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinterest-life/</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>#LI-REMOTE</p> <p>#LI-NB1</p><div class="content-conclusion"><p><strong>Our Commitment to Diversity:</strong></p> <p>At Pinterest, our mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love—and that includes our employees. We’re taking on the most exciting challenges of our working lives, and we succeed with a team that represents an inclusive and diverse set of identities and backgrounds.</p></div>
UX Engineer
Warsaw, POL
<div class="content-intro"><p><strong>About Pinterest</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">:&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></p> <p>Millions of people across the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas every day. It’s where they get inspiration, dream about new possibilities and plan for what matters most. Our mission is to help those people find their inspiration and create a life they love.&nbsp;In your role, you’ll be challenged to take on work that upholds this mission and pushes Pinterest forward. You’ll grow as a person and leader in your field, all the while helping&nbsp;Pinners&nbsp;make their lives better in the positive corner of the internet.</p> <p><em>Our new progressive work model is called PinFlex, a term that’s uniquely Pinterest to describe our flexible approach to living and working. Visit our </em><a href="https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinflex/" target="_blank"><em><u>PinFlex</u></em></a><em> landing page to learn more.&nbsp;</em></p></div><p><strong>What you’ll do:</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Work directly with the Motion design team in Warsaw to help bring their dynamic work to life.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Partner with the Design system team to align motion guidelines and build out a motion library.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Help build UI components, guidelines and interactions for the open source design system.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Partner with other teams across the Pinterest product to implement motion assets and promo pages within Pinterest.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scope and prioritize your work; serve as the technical subject matter expert to build an end to end service culture for the motion team; building its independence and raising its visibility.&nbsp;</span></li> </ul> <p><strong>What we’re looking for:</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">3+ years of experience building on the web platform.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Strong background in current web app development practices as well as a strong familiarity with Lottie, Javascript, Typescript and Webpack.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Solid experience with HTML and CSS fundamentals, and CSS Animation.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience with React.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Familiarity with accessibility best practices; ideally in the context of motion and animation.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Background and familiarity with modern design processes and tools like Figma and/or Adobe After Effects; working with designers and product managers.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Curiosity, strong communication and collaboration skills, self-awareness, humility, a drive for personal growth, and knowledge sharing.</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">#LI-HYBRID</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">#LI-DL2</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p><div class="content-conclusion"><p><strong>Our Commitment to Diversity:</strong></p> <p>At Pinterest, our mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love—and that includes our employees. We’re taking on the most exciting challenges of our working lives, and we succeed with a team that represents an inclusive and diverse set of identities and backgrounds.</p></div>
You may also like