Find out the secrets to how Taboola deploys and manages the thousands of servers that bring you recommendations every day.
Many R&D buzzwords and acronyms can seem like complex jargon — unnecessary shortcuts for concepts that are already pretty basic.
During the pandemic, most companies quickly adapted and moved to a work-from-home model, as a sudden necessity of the lockdown restrictions introduced by efforts to combat the spread of COVID-19.
We announced our plans to acquire Connexity, bringing eCommerce recommendations to the open web. And this is just the beginning.
If you fall, fall right – a tale of SRE critical incident management By Yehuda Levi, Tal Valani, Ariel Pisetzky & Eli Azulai Imagine this scenario – your data center is down. 1500 servers are down. Each server needs to be handled and monitored and the responsibility for each should be divided between all teammates. Each team is looking after the status of their services. Client facing services are impacted. New information keeps flowing in from different channels and the status of the outage and servers keep changing. How to get the list of the server affected? How to put it all in one place? How to assign responsibility for each? What is the status of each server? How can the internal clients receive ongoing status updates? What happens if a server was intentionally down before the incident? What happens if a more complex issue occurs and the time to […]
Failure. I need to talk about failure, and not any failure, my failure. I need to share it with everyone in the production group, everyone in R&D. My team, my peers, my managers. The meeting will start in just a few minutes and I am under fire to explain what went wrong, how I failed the organization and how we need to be better. General George S. Patton Jr. said “The test of success is not what you do when you are on top. Success is how high you bounce when you hit the bottom.” There is a lot to learn from that saying, and not only for people. Successful systems need to bounce back from a failure and do it well. IT systems need to be able to endure a catastrophic event and just dust it off. This is what we expect of our production systems in Taboola, […]
So, the firefighters are in your data center, there is no electricity, and the pager is more like a DDoS attack on your phone than anything informative. You look at your watch, multiple thoughts running through your head. Why me? Why now? What was the last DR test result? How do you pull the team out and through this IT catastrophe and survive to write about it? This is my story, my personal fight with the IT “Murphy laws” and how we can all benefit from it. It was a Friday, one you know you need to be extra careful with. It’s always the end of the work week or smack in the middle of the night. (No IT catastrophe ever happens when it’s convenient to you, now does it? They always cluster and bunch around the most difficult times.) Anyway, it’s the end of the day Friday and multiple […]
My First Time Running a Hackathon I’ve planned events before – but never anything like this 48-hour marathon spanning 200 participants across 3 continents and 2 time zones! When I was given the opportunity I was extremely excited, but at the same time somewhat anxious. Would I succeed in matching everyone’s energy and meeting their expectations? The task was daunting, but I took it slow and steady, step by step. First, I designed (with help from our talented graphic designer) a cool and eye-catching theme that would decorate all of our hackathon materials. Decorating slide decks, headers, banners, and t-shirts, our hackathon branding quickly became an R&D favorite. With the event only a month away, we held the official Taboola R&D Hackathon kickoff. Immediately, all of our participants – from engineers to designers to managers – began to gather in groups and cultivate project ideas. To encourage creativity and tech […]
I have not always worked at large scale companies such as Taboola. I have started my career in a small startup, where I was a full stack developer in a student role. As a first time developer, it was very important that I will be teamed-up with someone more experienced to learn from. Lucky for me, I was the only employee, working under the two founders – the CEO and CTO. Having a lot of one-on-one time with the CTO, working closely on bugs and features and discussing ideas, helped me improve my skills as a developer. Today, when I have more experience, I know how important it is to influence others who work with you. I try to spread the knowledge I have earned in the last few years, and help new and old employees as much as I can. In the day-to-day job, you mostly grow your skills […]
A few years ago, one of my friends suggested me to become a cybersecurity teacher in high school once a week as part of a program called Gvahim. I have not planned that it will contribute to my professional career, but I find a lot of analogies to my day to day role. I hope you will enjoy a different angle of management 101 guidelines. Program overview The program’s goals were to increase the knowledge of high school students in cybersecurity and increase the number of girls who study computer science. For three years in the program, students studied about Assembly, networks and operating systems, with an emphasis on security. Unlike traditional materials learned in high school, the lessons in the program put an emphasis on self-learning. The first two semesters were dedicated to learning the theoretical background using self-reading and small coding exercises. The last semester of the […]