Favorites FINN has this feature where users can mark classified ads as a favorite, making it easy to come back to certain ads later. The feature has been around quite a while, and the systems involved, both frontend and backend were becoming quite hard to maintain. So the AdView-team set out to rede...

At many companies, there are few data scientists and many projects which may be very interesting for the business to apply machine learning on. For most of these companies, starting greenfield projects with a data scientist on the team might be either a difficult political battle (to get assigned re...

Background On FINN.no people can search for classified ads, where the backend system is using Solr as the search engine. Default sorting on the vertical “torget” is by relevancy, which is based on Solr score. The Solr score for a document is again calculated from query relevance and the ad’s publish...

Tradisjonen tro åpner vi også i år dørene hjemme hos oss i Grensen for å dele våre erfaringer rundt hvordan vi jobber med produktutvikling. Teknologi er i fokus, og vi gleder oss til å vise dere hvordan vi bygger - og holder et av Norges mest besøkte nettsteder vedlike.​​​​​​​ En kveld er dedikert s...

Browser statistics, December 2017 at FINN.no# Yuletide is coming real soon now, and we haven’t published browser statistics for 2017 yet! The 2016 edition is here if you want to compare. How many visitors use a desktop or laptop? The trend continues, a higher percentage of the traffic is coming from...

Family and Equality Minister Solveig Horne handed out the award to FINN employees from the Accessibility Team, Product, Innovation and Technology. From left: Maiken Solberg Olsen, Solveig Horne, Lotte Johansen, Tor-Martin Storsletten, Karina Birkeland Lome, Ingrid Vestby Fredriksen, David Håsäther, ...

Akka workshoppers hard at work! In FINN.no we have experience in running distributed systems, and we often rely on asynchronous communication between our applications. Apache Kafka is the work-horse on the house, and it’s doing an excellent job for us. But this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t learn n...

During a hackathon at FINN.no, we figured we wanted to learn more about deep NLP-models. FINN.no has a large database with ads of people trying to sell stuff (around 1 million active ads at any time), and they are categorized into a category tree with three or four layers. For example, full suspensi...

The starting point In a galaxy very very close by, there were 5 brave summer interns working for FINN.no. They came from the far north (NTNU) and the far south (UiO) of the cold and rainy plains of Norway. 4 of them were taught in the arts of the computer, and one in the teachings of the design. The...

Some context People who publish their classified ads on FINN.no get access to various statistics to see how their ads are performing. For a user it can look something like this: Statistics the owner of a realestate ad gets to see The top left bar chart shows the repartition of the incoming traffic b...

Why make a Flappy Cat game? The Idea was to make a Flappy Bird with motion tracking control for our JavaZone stand. Some quick research told us it should be possible. Since cats are assosiated with FINN, it of course became a Flappy Cat game. Come and try it at JavaZone in September. Made by search ...

1. Introduction This article is intended for web developers who want to improve their understanding of the effect that WAI-ARIA has on assistive technologies. It will therefore be assumed that you already have basic knowledge about terms such as ARIA and screen readers. 1.1. Generalize screen reader...

FINN.no is the largest online marketplace in Norway, and we take continuous deployment seriously. We are about one hundred developers deploying new code to production 978 times each week. That is 978 / 100 = 9.78 deployments to production per developer every week. In order to get to these numbers an...

Åpen fagkveld 7. mars hjemme hos FINN - kl 15-20 For ett år siden åpnet vi dørene hjem til oss i Grensen for å dele våre erfaringer rundt hvordan vi jobber med produktutvikling. Vi fikk gode tilbakemeldinger på kvelden og nå ønsker vi å invitere til en ny fagkveld. Denne gangen blir agendaen mer ret...

The problem Making it easy to fill out forms is essential for getting data into our system at FINN småjobber, which is a service to get help with tasks like house cleaning or renovation, where the user submits a job that non-professionals bid on. Submitting a job is done by filling out a form with a...

… og hvorfor trenger jeg å bry meg om det? For å forstå programmatisk kjøp og salg av annonser, er det viktig å forstå hva vi legger i begrepene. Hva skiller det eksempelvis fra tradisjonelt merkevaresalg? Er det ene alternativet bedre enn det andre? I korte trekk er det viktig å forstå forskjellene...

As some of you may know, FINN is owned by Schibsted. What may not be that familiar, is that Schibsted has online classified solutions in several markets around the world, including Blocket in Sweden, Le Bon Coin in France and Vibbo in Spain. Schibsted has several hundreds of developers distributed a...

FINN.no skal ha en åpen studentkveld der vi forteller litt om hvordan vi jobber med fokus på teknologi, produkt og brukeropplevelse. Dette vil skje den 3. november fra klokken 16:00 – 20:00, her i våre lokaler i Grensen 5-7 i Oslo. Hvem kan melde seg på? Alle som studerer ved en relevant linje på et...

Last year, we presented the browser statistics of FINN.no as of June 2015. It’s time for an update! How many visitors use a desktop or laptop? Our first graph shows the share of our users using a mobile phone, tablet or a desktop computer to access FINN.no, regardless of whether they use our respons...

Having moved towards an architecture of microservices, FINN is already leveraging a number of technologies for identifying and dealing with service outages within this architectural style. With each piece of functionality being comprised of a growing number of individual services, specialized tools ...

This year’s summer intern team consisted of five technology students from UiO and NTNU and one in-house design intern. We have released continuously throughout an eight week period, and have ended with a final solution which is available to the public. The problem presented for this year’s summer pr...

Splitting up a storyboard in an Objective-C/Swift mixed legacy project How do you go about splitting up your storyboard into multiple smaller storyboards? And why would you? In this article I’ll tell you why we wanted to do this, what kind of problems we encountered along the way, and how we solved ...

What to do when your colleagues don't make accessible products. When developing a website which affects the life of almost every person in Norway, accessibility should be a main priority. Norwegians who are not able to use FINN.no are unable to find a home without assistance. Accessibility considera...

Onsdag 10. februar så hadde vi 140 personer på besøk hos FINN. Vi fortale litt om hvordan vi jobber i FINN og serverte pølser og øl. Nedenfor kan du finne presentasjonene fra fagkvelden. Programmet 15:15 - 15:30 Velkommen til FINN v/ adm.dir Sondre Gravir 15:30 – 16:10 Brukerorientering og datadreve...

Velkommen til åpen fagkveld onsdag 10. februar, fra kl 15-20 hjemme hos FINN i Grensen 5-7. Link til påmelding: (Beklager men arrangementet er fullt.) Før jul kom vi opp med en idé om å invitere til en fagkveld der vi skulle dele av våre FINNske erfaringer. Vi bestemte oss for å sjekke interessen fo...

Why won't this compile? (And why does riskyTask throw a PrinterException?!) One does not have to use lambdas in Java 8 long before running into the obstacle of checked Exceptions. Because the PrinterException is checked, the compiler forces us to deal with it, even within a lambda: private void demo...

During September, I collected answers on a survey about programming languages from people who work in one of the many companies that make up the Schibsted family. The survey is neither requested, sanctioned, approved or even suggested by anyone in management, in any Schibsted company. It is entirely...

This blogpost explains how some nifty features in ES7 will make it easier to write asynchronous code, and how ES6 generators will pave the way for this. Async/await My main annoyance with javascript and Node has been the tedious asynchronous programming model of callbacks, leading to nested callback...

HTTP/2 became an official standard in May earlier this year, and support is starting to land in servers already. The most recent, and very welcome addition, is nginx 1.9.5 [1]. What makes nginx extra awesome is that it’s very easy to set up in front of any other HTTP 1.x server (or HTTP/2 for that m...