While building a feature store to handle the massive growth of our machine-learning (“ML”) platform, we learned that using a mix of different databases can yield significant gains in efficiency and operational simplicity.
Category Archives: engineering
Failure Mitigation for Microservices: An Intro to Aperture
When dealing with failures in a microservice system, localized mitigation mechanisms like load shedding and circuit breakers have always been used, but they may not be as effective as a more globalized approach.
How to Speed up Local Development of a Docker Application running on AWS
While most engineering tooling at DoorDash is focused on making safe incremental improvements to existing systems, in part by testing in production (learn more about our end-to-end testing strategy), this is not always the best approach when launching an entirely new business line.
How DoorDash Designed a Successful Write-Heavy Scalable and Reliable Inventory Platform
As DoorDash made the move from made-to-order restaurant delivery into the Convenience and Grocery (CnG) business, we had to find a way to manage an online inventory per merchant per store that went from tens of items to tens of thousands of items.
Lifecycle of a Successful ML Product: Reducing Dasher Wait Times
Building an ML-powered delivery platform like DoorDash is a complex undertaking.
How We Scaled New Verticals Fulfillment Backend with CockroachDB
It would be almost impossible to build a scalable backend without a scalable datastore.
How We Reduced Our iOS App Launch Time by 60%
App startup time is a critical metric for users, as it’s their first interaction with the app, and even minor improvements can have significant benefits for the user experience.
How to Build a Flexible Customer Support Platform with Kotlin
As DoorDash’s business has grown with increasing order volumes and through emerging businesses including grocery delivery, our customer support experience also needed to scale up efficiently.
How to Speed Up SwiftUI Development and Testing Using PreviewSnapshots
One of the great features of developing in SwiftUI is Xcode Previews which enable rapid UI iteration by rendering code changes in near real-time alongside the SwiftUI code.
How DoorDash Upgraded a Heuristic with ML to Save Thousands of Canceled Orders
One challenge in running our platform is being able to accurately track Merchants’ operational status and ability to receive and fulfill orders.