Tech & Innovation
Cooking with Carrots
There’s a class on Udemy called “ If you can cook, you can code ” — absolutely true! What do these two things have in common? Curiosity : being interested in how things are put...
Mar 24, 2021
Read time: 12 min
Tech & Innovation
Tech & Innovation
Blueberry: Force Multiplier For The On-Call Engineer
On-call work is a race to turn noisy signals into shared judgment. The hardest minutes of that race aren't the ones spent fixing the bug — they're the ones spent figuring out what the bug even is, while everyone in the thread is asking the same question from a slightly different angle. Blueberry is the system we built at Instacart for those several minutes. It...
Jul 14, 2026
Read time: 16 min
Tech & Innovation
Exploring Images in Jetpack Compose
Jetpack Compose was announced at Google IO 2019 and is going to change how we do UI development on Android. I’ve been working a lot with the Android image APIs as I’ve been developing Coil...
Mar 24, 2021
Read time: 5 min
Tech & Innovation
Terraforming RDS — Bonus Anecdote
Thanks for making it all the way to the end of this series. See Part 1 for an overview of RDS and Terraform, Part 2 to get the basics of using Terraform with RDS and...
Mar 24, 2021
Read time: 3 min
Tech & Innovation
Terraforming RDS — Part 3
See Part 1 for an overview of RDS and Terraform, and Part 2 to get the basics of using Terraform with RDS and modules . This post covers parameter groups. What is a parameter group?...
Mar 24, 2021
Read time: 11 min
Tech & Innovation
Using RxJava autoConnect() and Relay to host a stream in a ViewModel
TL;DR To preserve and share the state of a stream (e.g. for rotations, dialogs), we can host the stream in Android’s ViewModel by using .replay(1).autoConnect() to share the stream’s state and a Relay to share...
Mar 7, 2019
Read time: 3 min
Tech & Innovation
From Print to Digital: Making Weekly Flyers Shoppable at Instacart Through Computer Vision and LLMs
Key contributors: Prithvi Srinivasan, Shishir Kumar Prasad, Kristen Morgan, Bryan Pham, Rick Shukla, Preeti Chadha, Vipul Bahubali, Ahmad Sajedi, and Ali Maleky Introduction Grocery flyers have long been a cornerstone of retail promotions, from paper...
Feb 9, 2026
Read time: 9 min