You may have heard the saying that the three most important things in real estate are location, location and location. That has been true from the beginning in Zillow Mobile apps for Android and iOS, where our apps start out with a map-based search. We use GPS to zoom in on the user’s current location, and the map will immediately show homes for sale and for rent nearby.
Figure 1 – Zillow Real Estate Android App
Like everyone at Zillow, I spent our most recent Hack Week trying to test the limit of coolness. I also gave myself a mission: to show the public, or at least the dev community, the power and potential Zillow data provides.
To access the Zillow data-trove, I used our public APIs. In four days, I built two projects: one for cloud, and one for desktop. Both earned some laughs and applause at our Hack Week demo day.
The first project is called zTalkBot: a chatbot backed by Zillow’s brain! It runs on Google App Engine. I’ve found that GAE is an excellent way to build up quick prototypes; it’s also one of the cloud platforms we build on for our production sites. To chat with it, add ztalkbot@appspot.com to your gtalk contacts now!
Here’s a demo:
As mentioned in a previous post on this blog, Zillow holds Hack Week events a few times a year during which teams work on projects of their own choosing. We put the “own choosing” of this philosophy to the test during our most recent Hack Week by tackling a Zillow Kegerator project. The tablet-controlled and Web-enabled Kegerator was built with the help of the open-source KegBot Project. The team consisted of Jarret Falkner and myself. We are both equipped with an appreciation of beer, but very little electronics experience. With the help of the KegBot documentation and some tips from other Zillow employees we set off to complete the project in a week. Read on to see the results.
When we built our Premier Agent Websites, we decided at the beginning to base the product on the WordPress core. We knew we wanted to host it ourselves for ultimate control, we wanted to run bare minimal off-the-shelf plugins for security reasons, we needed it to scale it to tens and hundreds of thousands of sites, and we wanted it to be literally faster than any other provider out there. In order to meet these criteria and our high standards, we knew we had to make some smart infrastructure and architecture decisions.
We did things a bit different than what many of the current WordPress best practices recommend and many existing plugins offer, and we feel great about what we ended up with. With that in mind, we’d like to share some of our differentiating secret sauce with the WordPress community.
Before a user’s browser even hits a server for the initial load, an IP needs to be resolved via DNS. DNS performance is far more important (PDF) than many people realize, and this part of the infrastructure should never be glossed over without any thought.
In our case, we host nearly all of our clients’ DNS records on Amazon’s high-performance and globally-distributed Route 53 service. We allow each of our clients to host the free domain they get through us, or use one they already own, and manage the DNS for that domain on Route 53 via that API and a custom UI. We also host the DNS for our CDN domains (more on that later) on Route 53. The result is that the lookups on our clients’ domains and the CDN domains are incredibly fast!
[Continue Reading...]
I realize we are well into October, and our awesome summer engineering interns have gone back to college, but I have a good excuse for why this post is late. Most of our engineering interns are still working with us part time while they attend school. I am biased, but I believe this has a lot to say about the Zillow Internship program and the efforts we make to ensure students have a great summer with us. At Zillow, we don’t have our engineering interns working on side projects and tools that no one cares about. We have our interns working on projects that are very important to our business and consumer experience.
Our engineering team is organized into small product teams with anywhere from 5-10 engineers on each team. We embed interns in these teams and assign them a mentor to further help the intern ramp up on our technology and code base and to help answer questions along the way. This year, we had placements on several teams: mobile, community, real estate shopping, professional tools and services and a new team that is working on some things we can’t quite talk about yet. Projects involved writing native mobile applications on our Android platform, improving back-end services that power our real estate shopping experience — where speed and scalability are key factors — and innovating on our consumer, Web-based user interface. These projects involved new technologies, mostly Open Source, which will be relevant regardless of where they go to work after graduating.
Joel Spolsky, the creator and CEO behind Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, stopped by Zillow’s headquarters in Seattle to talk about the intersection of cultural anthropology and technology.
What may be a strange combination, said Spolsky, makes sense when you’re running a website that has a user base the size of Seoul, South Korea.
Stack Exchange is a free, community-powered, question-and-answer space dedicated mainly to Web designers and engineers. Spolsky started the site to fill the void that other sites like Ask.com and Yahoo Answers created.
A Megaman made of Legos
I find that at Zillow, I’m tackling interesting problems, meeting new challenges and learning something new every day. We spend a lot of time building new technologies that allow Zillow to serve our users better. We also spend time building other important things, such as Legos.
There is great joy in doing the wrong thing for the right reasons when it works and no one gets hurt. That’s how things went with our new charting web service, Paparazzi Charts.
Charts are a really important part of the content on Zillow. We generate a lot of complex and interesting data about homes, and charts help our users visualize and understand it. One of our most important metrics is the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), which is used throughout our services, and has also appeared in several academic studies and Congressional testimony. Here’s an example chart of the Zestimate of a home, the ZHVI in the zipcode, and the ZHVI in the city, over time.
Every few months, the Zillow engineering team spends a week hacking. Projects range from cool product ideas, to improved tools, to anything else that improves our internal efficiency. There’s only one rule during Hack Week: You’re not allowed to work on your normal job.
With more than 100 people participating across our three tech offices in Seattle, San Francisco and Irvine, our June Hack Week had more than 50 projects! Some companies do hack days, or noon to midnight, but we’ve found that a full week gives us enough time to go deeper and be more ambitious with our projects. In the past, whole new business ideas have been hatched and prototyped. People usually work in small teams, and the best projects happen when people hook up with people from other teams outside their usual group.
The engineering team at Zillow has been cranking out innovative products since we first launched our website back in 2006. We are launching this blog to share and discuss some of the technology and product insights we have encountered along the way. All of the posts will come from members of the engineering team, and will focus on: