Stack History: A Timeline of Pinterest's Tech Stack Evolution

Pinterest now has 335 million Monthly Active Users with more than 200 billion Pins across more than 4 billion boards. It's hard to believe that Pinterest started out as a small site with a few thousand users back in 2009. But their initial tech stack is part of the company’s DNA and is still around in some form today. Many know Pinterest as a Python shop, but there’s far more to the story. Since early on they’ve had to deal with scaling their site to keep up with their rapid growth.

Over time their data infrastructure and machine learning capabilities became their strongest assets as they scaled to recommending over 4 billion ideas to over 250 million users in 2018. This stack timeline tells a story of one of the fastest growing consumer software companies in history. Find out how they scaled from 0 to billions of pins and inspired hundreds of millions to be more creative.

How we did it

We synthesized dozens of sources (most of which are available on Pinterest’s new Company Engineering Profile) from YouTube, community sites, and Pinterest’s Engineering blog. Each Stack Decision has a link to the original source content if you want to dive in deeper into any of the decisions.

The original Pinterest tech stack

Pinterest was founded in 2009, and the site launched in closed beta in March 2010. Marty Weiner, Founding Engineer at Pinterest, gave a tech talk where he outlined their initial tech stack which was cobbled together by the 3 founders which was Python, MySQL, and the intial site was hosted on Rackspace.

GOTO 2014 • Scaling Pinterest • Marty Weiner

Mar 2010


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