Developer Productivity in Features

Cutting Through the Noise: Three Things We've Learned About Generative AI and Developer Productivity

Learn how eBay is deploying AI at scale to unlock employee productivity.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Developer Productivity in Engineering

The Staging Dichotomy: Part Two

A two-part series on how eBay turned around an impeding staging environment into its biggest asset for developer productivity.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Developer Productivity in Engineering

The Staging Dichotomy: Part One

A two-part series on how eBay turned around an impeding staging environment into its biggest asset for developer productivity.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Machine Learning in Research

Building a Product Catalog: eBay's 2nd Annual University Machine Learning Competition

Participating universities will structure listing data to help solve a real-world ecommerce challenge.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Machine Learning in Product

Building a Product Catalog: What we Learned from our University Machine Learning Competition

We challenged more than 100 college students at seven universities to structure listing data using AI and machine learning.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Performance Engineering in Engineering

Speed By A Thousand Cuts

In 2019, eBay prioritized a company-wide initiative, aptly called “Speed,” focused on improving the performance of critical eBay flows across all platforms — iOS, Android, and Web. This article explains the journey and outcomes.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Machine Learning in Research

Building a Product Catalog: eBay's University Machine Learning Competition

Trade has played a critical role in the history of humanity and yet, data from ecommerce, the modern form of trading, has received limited attention from academia. We at eBay want to change that.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
WebAssembly in Engineering

WebAssembly at eBay: A Real-World Use Case

From the time it was announced, WebAssembly caused a huge buzz in the front-end world. The web community readily embraced the idea of taking code written in programming languages other than JavaScript and running that code in the browser. Above all WebAssembly consistently guarantees native speeds much faster than JavaScript. At eBay, we were no different.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan and Pranav Jha
Web Technology in Engineering

The Web Push Checklist

eCommerce sites are ideal candidates for push notifications and eBay is no exception. Timely notifications can help users track the status of items that they have purchased or watching or bidding, without effectively being on the site. But we are also aware that push notifications can end up being a double-edged sword. At eBay, we recently launched web push notifications for a subset of desktop users and want to share that experience.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Performance Engineering in Engineering

Beyond HTTPS

HTTPS is not just about security. There are many benefits that come along with it. One such benefit is access to modern technologies. Check out how eBay leverages some of these new technologies that HTTPS opens up.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Multi-screen Application Development in Engineering

Experience Services — eBay’s Solution to Multi-Screen Application Development

Many companies want to offer their products and services as both web and native experiences -- so-called multi-screen application development. Application development on various devices is historically siloed. The eBay Experience Service interface abstracts most business logic/knowledge away from clients to provide new functionality to native and web apps with minimum or no client code change.

By: Chuck Zheng and Senthil Padmanabhan
Frontend Engineering in Engineering

eBay’s Font Loading Strategy

The usage of custom fonts in web pages have steadily increased in recent years. As of this writing, 68% of sites in the HTTP Archive use at least one custom font. At eBay, we have been discussing custom web fonts for typography for quite some time, but never really pursued it. The main reason was due to uncertainty in end user experiences from a performance standpoint.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Coding Practices in Engineering

Building a UI Component in 2017 and Beyond

As web developers, we have seen the guidelines for building UI components evolve over the years.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Frontend Engineering in Engineering

Experience the Lightning Bolt

Three months back we announced how we are transforming the shopping experience at eBay, enabling our users to browse with style and speed.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Frontend Engineering in Engineering

Browse eBay with Style and Speed

One of the top initiatives for eBay this year is to provide a compelling browse experience to our users.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Frontend Engineering in Engineering

The Path to JavaScript Next

Like all other JavaScript enthusiasts around the globe, engineers at eBay were eagerly watching the space of ECMAScript 6.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Frontend Engineering in Engineering

Packaging for Performance

An interesting topic of discussion in recent times has been around static resource (JS/CSS) packaging for web applications.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Coding Practices in Engineering

The Power of Perceived Performance

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Coding Practices in Engineering

Don't Build Pages, Build Modules

We are in an interesting phase of rethinking frontend engineering across eBay Marketplaces, and this blog summarizes where we are heading.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Coding Practices in Engineering

Yet Another Responsive vs. Adaptive Story

Yes, like everyone else in web development, eBay has become immersed in the mystical world of Responsive Web Design.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Coding Practices in Engineering

How We Built eBay's First Node.js Application

For the most part, eBay runs on a Java-based tech stack.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Developer Tools in Engineering

Early Detection of Frontend Single Points of Failure

Until fairly recently, a single point of failure (SPOF)—a condition that can bring down an entire system—has been predominantly associated with the backend world of server clusters, networking, and operations.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Coding Practices in Engineering

Five JavaScript Tips for a Sleek User Experience

The eBay Motors engineering team took up an initiative to revisit some of the legacy JavaScript code shared across various pages, optimizing them to leverage the latest advancements in HTML5.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Coding Practices in Engineering

The New eBay Motors Homepage is 2X Faster

Our eBay Motors homepage has been around for more than 5 years, and we needed to give it a facelift.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan
Coding Practices in Engineering

Data URI Sprites

In the inaugural topic of this blog on site speed, Hugh Williams spoke briefly about image spriting as a technique to speed up the rendering of a page.

By: Senthil Padmanabhan

Senthil Padmanabhan is a Vice President, Fellow at eBay where he leads front-end and user experience engineering across eBay’s marketplace. Since joining eBay eight years ago, Senthil has transformed eBay’s technology platform with his outside-the-box projects and initiatives. His leadership has paved the way for rapid software development and innovation across the organization, and he was recognized as one of the 2018 honorees for Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 under 40. Currently in his role as a Technical Fellow, Senthil leads the web platform for eBay, specifically focused on efforts to make eBay experiences faster across web, iOS, and Android. Before he joined eBay, Senthil was a software engineer with the Yahoo! Mail team. Senthil is a speaker and author, who frequently blogs on eBay's Tech Blog.

Abstract:

Various methods and systems for providing customized-item-specific interfaces of items on extended interface devices in a search system. A plurality of items ? each having an extended interface configuration that indicates customized-item-specific interface instructions for extended presentation of items on extended interface devices ? are accessed at a primary interface device associated with a set of extended interface devices including a second-user extended interface device that supports a social mode. Based on the first extended interface configuration of a first item, a determination is made that the first item is extendable to a first extended interface device in the set of extended interface devices. Based on determining that the first item is extendable, automatically causing generation of a customized-item-specific interface of the first item on the first extended interface device. Causing generation of the customized-item-specific interface can be based on communicating item extended interface data to the first extended interface device.

Country: Australia
Grant Date: November 16, 2023
INVENTORS: Parin Jogani, Senthil Padmanabhan, Ethan Rubinson, Mark Weinberg

Abstract:

A first test case identifier that indicates a first test case is received. The first test case is indicative of testing one or more features of an application associated with the electronic marketplace. The first test case identifier is compared to a plurality of attributes. The plurality of attributes are associated with one or more listings that describe one or more items for sale in an electronic marketplace. Based at least in part on the comparing, it is determined that a first set of attributes, of the plurality of attributes, are test data candidates to be used as input to the first test case. Based at least in part on the determining, the first test case is caused to be run using at least one of the first set of attributes as test data for input.

Country: United States
Grant Date: January 3, 2023
INVENTORS: Kandakumar Doraisamy, Tomer Lancewicki, Senthil Padmanabhan, Ramesh Periyathambi, Srikanth Rentachintala

Abstract:

Automated determination of web page rendering performance techniques and systems are described. In one example, a web page including multiple user-interactive elements that can be selected or navigated via user input is received. A frame rendering system is employed to automatically identify the user-interactive elements and generate scripts to simulate user input at the user-interactive elements. The generated scripts are then used to simulate user input at the user-interactive elements. The scripts may be generated to simulate user interaction via a variety of different device types, and under a variety of different network conditions. During the simulation, a rendering performance score for the web page is generated by monitoring rendering performance relative to a threshold rendering rate. Rendering performance may be monitored on an individual basis while simulating user input at different user-interactive elements, such that the rendering performance report includes individual rendering performance scores for each user-interactive element.

Country: United States
Grant Date: October 26, 2021
INVENTORS: Kandakumar Doraisamy, Namrata Mummaneni, Senthil Padmanabhan, Srikanth Rentachintala

Abstract:

Methods, systems, and computer programs are presented for optimizing data delivery for a User Interface (UI) to a plurality of device types. One method includes operations for receiving at a server a request for an update to the UI of a client device, and for determining, by an orchestrator at the server, modules associated with the request, each module being presented on the UI. Further, the method includes operations for invoking domain services based on the determined modules (each domain service returning respective domain service data), and for synthesizing the domain service data to generate module data for each module. The synthesizing includes selecting from the domain service data and combining the selected domain service data to generate the module data. The module data is transmitted to the client device for all the modules, the module data being processable by the client device to update modules of the UI.

Country: United States
Grant Date: August 6, 2019
INVENTORS: Senthil Padmanabhan, Louis Perrochon, Chuck Zheng
Senthil Padmanabhan

Senthil Padmanabhan