Category: Engineering

Introduction Maven is widely used as a Java project build tool at eBay. As an essential component of Maven, maven-resolver resolves declared dependencies, calculates dependency graphs, mediates conflicts and forms the classpaths for compilation and deployment. This is the so-called dependency resolution process.  One of the main impediments to fast iterations of software development was […]

Introduction Geohash is an encoding system with a unique identifier for each region on the planet. Therefore, all geohash units can be associated with an individual set of digits and letters. Geohash is a plugin built by Grab that is available in the Java OpenStreetMap Editor (JOSM) tool, which comes in handy for those who […]

MLflow is the premier platform for model development and experimentation. Thousands of data scientists use MLflow Experiment Tracking every day to find the best candidate models through a powerful GUI-based experience which allows them to view, filter, and sort models based on parameters, performance metrics, and source information. Today, we are thrilled to announce several […]

Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have unlocked unprecedented opportunities for businesses to get value out of their text data. Natural Language Processing can be used for a wide range of applications, including text summarization, named-entity recognition (e.g. people and places), sentiment classification, text classification, translation, and question answering. In many cases, you can get […]

One of eBay’s consistent struggles, one common to all ecommerce platforms, is catching cyber attacks. These include, but are certainly not limited to, account take-overs, collusions, money laundering and more. Violations like these can cause financial or non-material loss to our buyers and sellers, as well as to eBay as a company. For this reason, […]

Introduction In a microservices architecture, services are typically integrated through remote procedure calls or asynchronous messages. The traditional way of testing microservice integration is through end-to-end integration tests. Unfortunately, the integration environments may be unstable due to external dependencies, which makes end-to-end testing brittle and less efficient. This is quite common in real-world scenarios. Another […]

Built-in functions extend the power of SQL with specific transformations of values for common needs and use cases. For example, the LOG10 function accepts a numeric input argument and returns the logarithm with base 10 as a double-precision floating-point result, and the LOWER function accepts a string and returns the result of converting each character […]

Since their initial release, SQL user-defined functions have become hugely popular among both Databricks Runtime and Databricks SQL customers. This simple yet powerful extension to SQL supports defining and re-using custom transformation logic. In this blog, we describe several enhancements we have recently made to make SQL user-defined functions even more user-friendly and powerful, along […]

eBay’s annual Machine Learning Challenge for University Students is one way that the company finds bright young minds in the fields of engineering and technology. Students are tasked with a thorny problem — last year, it was predicting shipping times — and the finest solutions find their creators rewarded with an internship.  This year, applicants […]

Introduction When shoppers come to eBay, our goal is to help them easily find a product they’ll love. Our newly launched recommendation model, commonly referred to as a “ranker,” now provides more relevant product recommendations by leveraging deep learning Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to encode item titles as semantic embeddings via a Bidirectional Encoder […]