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
Our Early Journey to Transform Instacart's Discovery Recommendations with LLMs
Key Contributors: Moein Hasani, Hamidreza Shahidi, Trace Levinson, Guanghua Shu Introduction At Instacart, we are laser-focused on improving the user experience by making shopping feel easy, engaging, and personalized. Our discovery surfaces play a central role in bringing this to life. Alongside explicit Search intents, discovery is our opportunity to meet customers’ implicit needs, presenting them with the most relevant and inspiring content we have...
Feb 26, 2026
Read time: 16 min
Tech & Innovation
What the Formula? Managing state on Android
State management is usually the most complex part of a UI application. At Instacart, we have been using RxJava to manage state for a few years now. As our Android team grew, we realized that...
Mar 24, 2021
Read time: 7 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 — 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
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