GIPHY Engineering: Recent Episodes
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Nick Hasty, GIPHY’s VP of Product, Machine Learning was recently interviewed on the ML Ops Community Podcast where he talked about GIPHY’s history, some AI/ML projects GIPHY has done over the years, and the current AI startup landscape.
You watch the interview on YouTube, or listen to the podcast on Spotify.
Welcome readers!
I’m Jake Martella and I’d like to share a recent journey of mine that I think may shine a light on the struggles of learning new career skills, taking on new challenges, and conquering self doubt.
Firstly, who am I?
I started at GIPHY in 2018 as NFL Editor, and have donned multiple roles over the years from Sports Editor to now finding my stride as Editorial Director for Sports. The GIPHY Sports department is vibrant and constant. Our work requires meticulous tagging, curation and editorialization. With hundreds of official sports partners, thousands of GIFs, and billions of views, managing such content must be thorough. Recently, my passion for sports collided with the dynamic realm of tech. In perhaps the best example of problem solving I can offer, I decided to one day devote time to developing some skills that would allow me to build a solution to a tedious problem. With the endless ingestion of sports GIF content, it was cumbersome to host my relevant hashtags in a messy google doc or notepad. Something had to be done, so…
Rough Beginnings
It all began with a three-month coding boot camp hosted by Brainstation, a crucible where my determination was forged in the fires of frustration and doubt. I often felt like the slowest ship in a regatta, constantly trailing behind my peers, grappling for understanding where others seemed to effortlessly sail. The shadows of self-doubt loomed large, and I frequently thought I didn’t belong. Although I completed the course, I didn’t feel I deserved to. Self loathing…exhibit A.
Progress
Seven months later, while working full-time and coding in my spare time, I started to make serious progress in my understanding. I saw the first rays of “Eureka!” pierce through the clouds of confusion. So much so that I eventually developed a web-app as a side project that helped me in my everyday work at GIPHY as Sports Editor. I was thrilled with the result. The ability to organize tags into categories and cards with a simple copy button saved me a great amount of time curating content, a task I do dozens of times per day, hundreds per week, and thousands per month!
After showing the application to friends and colleagues, a colleague suggested that there may be a possibility to build this feature directly into the GIPHY infrastructure, and that I may be able to gain valuable experience coding in a real world dev environment. While this suggestion made my blood pressure spike, it also presented an unimaginable opportunity…
The possibility of integrating my feature into GIPHY’s infrastructure was both thrilling and terrifying. ‘Coding for GIPHY? Am I in over my head?’ I wondered. But I refused to let doubt anchor me. In the words of Gretzky: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
My journey was a rollercoaster of emotions, marked by trial and error, and a generous dose of humility. I leaned on mentors and late-night debugging sessions, savoring the small victories along the way. While collaborating with more experienced developers at GIPHY, I learned invaluable lessons. I discovered that each company has its own unique approach to product development. Google searches didn’t always offer the right solution because many errors required a deeper understanding of the specific systems, authentications and methodologies being used. Also, note to self: always remember to make sure you’re connected to the VPN .
I successfully navigated the native dev environment, ultimately creating the GIPHY Tag Tamer—an invaluable hashtag organizer now used internally company-wide, simplifying content curation.
What is the Tag Tamer?
The Tag Tamer empowers staff users to generate categorized hashtag lists, neatly arranged within distinct cards. Each card features a title and a dedicated space for storing an array of frequently used hashtags. There’s a convenient “COPY” button on each card so staff users can quickly attach relevant tags to their clipboard and paste them on desired content. This feature streamlines the handling of GIPHY’s extensive GIF library, enabling efficient organization and archiving of the data. Consider the NBA All-Star game scenario, where the influx of NBA-related content necessitates the strategic use of hyper-specific hashtags for effective content management and access. Multiplying this process across various sports leagues, teams, and tournaments underscores the potential challenges in handling such an extensive content repertoire. That, in a nutshell, is the Tag Tamer.
How does it work?
The tag tamer tool leverages a powerful combination of React for the frontend, TypeScript for enhanced code quality, and Styled Components for UI design. On the backend, it harnesses the robust capabilities of Django, providing a reliable and scalable foundation for data management and processing. This stack ensures a seamless and intuitive user experience.
Final Thoughts
This tool, born from struggle and self-questioning, is now a vital part of my daily workflow, streamlining content management for myself and my colleagues. And I’m proud of it.
While I once thought I might never get the hang of this coding thing, I am a true believer that embracing challenges and continuing to learn for the sake of learning is always worth it. Also, never, ever be ashamed or scared to ask for help.
Trust yourself. Bet on yourself. This is the way.
-Jake Martella, Editorial Director, Sports
The Problem When people use GIPHY, they are looking to express themselves in a fun and entertaining way. Certain search results might seem funny and ironic to some but can trigger others who are struggling with mental health. With this in mind, identifying search terms that may indicate that a person is struggling helps us […]
As a software engineer, I’ve always been seeking ways to stay effective. Since I’ve been working in tech for 10+ years, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with a lot of incredible individuals. I’ve seen the techniques that top performers use to maintain their productivity; thankfully, they tend to display similar patterns. In this short […]
In this article, I will share the implementation details of an iOS SwiftUI app with CoreML features. The app captures a front camera stream, applies a state-of-the-art Video Matting model, and outputs a corresponding video sequence without a background (a.k.a. green screen) in real-time.
To make it easier for React Native developers to implement GIPHY and let their users share GIFs, Clips, and more, we released the GIPHY SDK for React Native a few months ago.
A/B Testing in Search I joined the Search team in February as their Product Manager after 2 years in the Data Science department. I’ve always admired how the team deeply integrated analytics into the Search algorithm. As I began to ramp up in the role, I spent hours reading all the documentation of the various […]
GIPHY serves a lot of GIF media content. Over 10 billion pieces of content per day, in fact. In addition to media requests, which represent the actual download of GIFs, we also provide public API and SDK services for developers to use in their products, which gives their users access to our enormous library. As […]
GIPHY literally has a gazillion pieces of content indexed in its library. Just head over to the website GIPHY.com and type in your fav search terms to get a sense of the incredibly vast amount of results (GIFs, Stickers, Clips, etc.) that we surface. However, sometimes what you want a GIF to say is quite […]
At Betaworks Studios’ “RENDER(lite); GPT-What?” conference, Director of Machine Learning, Nick Hasty spoke on our in-house NLP tool called “GIPHY2Vec” (a modification of Word2Vec). To learn more, check out the full talk below! For more great content, keep an eye on Betaworks Studios’ Event Calendar.
This is part two of the GIPHY Autotagging blog post series, where we’ll cover modeling, configuration of our training environment, and share our results. In part one, we outlined our motivation for this product and provided an overview of existing related approaches. Additionally, we described the training and evaluation data we have at hand and […]
Major social and cultural events mean “all hands on deck” here at GIPHY, as millions of people across the world use GIFs to express themselves as these events unfold. Award shows, championship games, and holidays (such as New Year’s Eve) require resources across the company — from our Editorial team “live-GIFing” video feeds in real-time […]
Motivation GIPHY search is powered by ElasticSearch, where GIFs are represented as documents with various features, such as tags and captions. Tags in particular have a great impact on the search performance. Therefore, at GIPHY Engineering, we continuously track and improve their quality with both manual and automated verification. However, for the last couple of […]
GIPHY users have relied on us to help them better express themselves since day one. First, with GIFs, and later followed by Stickers, animated emoji & text, Video, etc. We know, based on the frequent use of captions on GIFs, that sometimes text is important to contextualize visual media. This led the way to the […]
Like many companies, GIPHY Engineering has been using Kubernetes for the past several years to help our teams quickly build, compile into containers, and distribute applications to our AWS servers. One of the problems with any Kubernetes distribution is: well, the distribution. There is an amalgamation of tools out there vying for your attention (and, […]
We always work hard at GIPHY to help people find the right GIF at the right time. Adoption of gRPC helps us continue to keep our services fast, stable, and fault-tolerant as we scale to over 10 billion pieces of content a day. When the GIPHY API, which serves content to our third party integrations, […]
Here at GIPHY Engineering, we frequently use FFmpeg to resize and reformat GIFs. We generate around 40 different renditions for each GIF uploaded to our platform, so it’s important we do so as efficiently as we can. While FFmpeg is powerful, it was designed for processing MP4 files, and its support for the GIF format […]
A sticker (left) is just a GIF (right) with transparent pixels. Here at GIPHY, we differentiate between GIFs and Stickers in our business language, as the two products are served to different searches and customers. However, we still use the GIF format to store stickers – all they really are is GIFs with transparent pixels. […]
FastText is a library for efficient text classification and representation learning. Like its sibling, Word2Vec, it produces meaningful word embeddings from a given corpus of text. Unlike its sibling, FastText uses n-grams for word representations, making it great for text-classification projects like language detection, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling. Here at GIPHY, we use FastText […]
A GIF feature in your app can increase engagement and give your users a valuable new way to express themselves, but building it can be hard! You have to figure out how and where to get the content, design and implement a UI, test, iterate…the list goes on. That’s why we built the GIPHY SDK, […]
We’d like to highlight four public API endpoints designed to increase engagement and create better user experiences for products and projects integrating GIPHY. At GIPHY, we use these endpoints to help users discover content and as ancillary features for our core GIF search experience — as we know a blank search input on a platform […]
We’ve joined Facebook and many other partners such as Microsoft, Pinterest, Slack, TikTok, Twitter, and WeChat to support and participate in the #BuildforCOVID19 Online Hackathon — a new global hackathon to tackle the challenges and problems related to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. We want to encourage you – our global developer community – to join […]
GIPHY uses Elasticsearch to deliver all the best GIFs. Elasticsearch is an extremely fast, open source search engine supported by a great community. It has a robust Query API which allows us to quickly iterate our search algorithm. The Mapping API enables us to prototype new signals and account for the quirks in GIF metadata. […]
December 10, 2019 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY Join us and the MusicTech meetup for a night of demos and musical performances! MusicTech is a community that’s supports the people who are defining what music technology will look like in the future. Demos by:– Christian Rutledge, Muzooka– Hazmin Valdes, BillFold POS– Deane Marcus, RIFF […]
Here at GIPHY, we receive thousands of GIF uploads each day. Like any tech company, we love data: we want to attach as much data as we can to these GIFs so that we can improve their search performance and the user experience. We also want to do so in an organized, centralized, and asynchronous […]
When a brand new GIF gets uploaded onto GIPHY.com, there’s usually not a lot of data associated with it to make sure that it’s discoverable via search. While we do rely on machine learning for tag generation, we also allow uploading users and GIPHY’s content team to manually add “tags”, which are keywords that help […]
October 10, 2019 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY Come join us on October 10th for another iteration of DevOps and Drinks, this time featuring our GIPHY Engineering’s very own Site Reliability Engineer, Bryant Rockoff, who will discuss how GIPHY has deployed and is using Spinnaker to help ensure we help to keep the internet […]
October 3rd, 2019 @ 26 Bridge, Brooklyn NY Come see us at The Round NYC on October 3rd where we’ll be participating in a panel, sharing what it’s like to work at GIPHY Engineering and chatting with candidates about opportunities to join the team! The event is completely free. You can find more info and […]
September 25, 2019 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY Join us at GIPHY where 3D Print Fashion, in conjunction with Women of Wearables, are putting on a visual presentation and interactive panel dedicated to the future of fashion tech. Learn more about the people behind fashion’s most future forward innovations and exciting designs. oin us […]
August 20, 2019 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY Join us at GIPHY on Tuesday, August 20th for two exciting talks featuring our very own iOS developer, Chris Maier as well as Mike Sanderson of Tendigi. Doors open at 6:30, and presentations begin at 7. In Chris’ talk, “Building a GIF Carousel with UICollectionViewLayout” he’ll […]
Weekly Search Trends at GIPHY The Product Analytics team at GIPHY sits at the interface of technical data engineering teams and the rest of our business. We’re tasked with making data easily accessible across the org and uncovering insights to enhance our product and sales strategies. This can take the form of building data visualizations, […]
July 30, 2019 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY At GIPHY we love data because it lets us make data-driven decisions that improve the quality of results our users get from our search engine. Recently, GIPHY moved their Luigi pipelines from legacy infrastructure on managed AWS EC2 instances to a new containerized ecosystem inside of […]
Here at GIPHY we have a lot of services. These services vary in language, visibility, and scale. Since I started a few months ago, I’ve been working on a newer internal service called Bouncer. Bouncer is a CMS built on top of the Django framework and primarily talks to another internal Scala service. When I […]
Today, we’re announcing our new and improved GIPHY SDK, the fastest and easiest way to integrate the world’s most-loved GIF library — and the full GIPHY experience — into your app for free. Built with developers and product designers in mind, our SDK is the best way to get direct access to GIFs, stickers, and new […]
As GIPHY Engineering continues to grow, we thought it was important to take a step back and have a conversation about what it means to be a GIPHY Engineer. The goal wasn’t to create a spreadsheet with all the prototypical attributes of the perfect engineer, but instead to understand a bit more about ourselves as […]
Here at GIPHY, we love data. We love it because it lets us make data-driven decisions that improve the quality of results our users get from our search engine. The more search traffic on GIPHY, the more insight we have into what’s popular and trending. We use these insights/signals to fine-tune search results we serve […]
GIPHY Engineering’s head of R&D, Nick Hasty, joined the Practical AI Podcast to discuss the recently released Celebrity Detector. In the episode, Nick shares more details about the project, and also sheds some light on GIPHY’s origins, AI at GIPHY and more! Check out the episode below: Practical AI 38: GIPHY’s celebrity detector – Listen […]
March 30, 2019 2 Metro Center – Brooklyn, NY GIPHY Engineering is proud to sponsor “Level Up: A Hackathon for Gaming with a Mission” by Tech Kids Unlimited (TKU), a tech-based organization for children and teens with special needs. TKU was founded by NYU Tandon Adjunct Digital Media Professor Beth Rosenberg and her son. The […]
March 12, 2019 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY GIPHY Engineering is excited to host ny-scala! For this event, we’ll have a talk by Aesa, “A Tale of Two Type Systems” where he’ll address the questions below and more! “What are typeclasses and why do so many functional libraries use them? How do they fit into […]
March is Women’s History Month! For this year’s special month, GIPHY Engineering is celebrating with a whole new sticker pack dedicated to Women Pioneers in STEM. All stickers were illustrated and brought to life by the amazing Denyse Mitterhofer, and you can find them on GIPHY.com, the GIPHY mobile app and anywhere you get your […]
GIPHY is excited to announce the public availability of our custom machine learning model, The GIPHY Celebrity Detector, which is able to discern over 2,300 celebrity faces with 98% accuracy. The model was trained to identify the most popular celebs on GIPHY, and can identify and make predictions for multiple faces across a sequence of […]
February 12, 2019 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY While on the outside GIPHY search may seem like a standard search problem, being on the top of the zeitgeist is an increasingly viral world is a constant challenge. GIPHY has devised ways to make sure their users are getting the Most relevant search via models […]
January 30, 2019 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY GIPHY started as a way to catalogue animated GIFS and since then has evolved as a platform of creation and discovery. Fundamentally, surfacing content has been a core challenge. We have a team dedicated to providing the best Search experience for animated GIFs. During this workshop […]
January 26, 2019 IDEAS42 – New York, NY Over the last four months, the genEquality Hackathon has created space and opportunities for teams to form and develop innovative solutions to alleviate gender inequality. The Hackathon has engaged participants across the globe – from the United States, Germany, India, Mexico, Japan, Myanmar, and more – all […]
GIPHY’s API servers handle over a million requests a minute. To handle this load, we divide the work between a variety of microservices, each of which fulfills part of the request. For example, one service performs searches, another supplies metadata about GIFs, yet another validates user credentials, and so on. Our first iteration of microservices […]
December 10, 2018 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY Join us for an exclusive look under the hood at GIPHY! GIPHY Engineering manager Bjorn Roche will provide insight into the microservice architecture and exciting engineering challenges the GIPHY team faces each day. As an engineering manager, Bjorn is responsible for all things career development and […]
December 4, 2018 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY Join us for an evening mashup of Python and Startups! At GIPHY HQ we’re hosting Python Software Foundation’s Startup Row. At the event, startups will five minutes to pitch and another five minutes of live Q&A from the audience. The winning team will be awarded two […]
November 29, 2018 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY GIPHY Engineering is hosting Women Who Code + genEquality’s themed hacknight “Coding for Gender Equality.” This is a general hacknight that will also allow participants who want to work on a genEquality project the opportunity to form a group and start a project for the hackathon. […]
GIPHY’s iOS app grid design includes a particular layout called the “Waterfall Layout.”It allows differentsized GIFs and Stickers to fit together in a continuous steam.An issue with this kind of layout is that we need to dynamically calculate the frame-size of every cell because we don’t know what the height of the GIF will be […]
October 24, 2018 Splash HQ – New York, NY We’re excited to be part of the Splash ‘Microservices & Microwave Dinners’ meetup, where we’ll have an open discussion on microservices – the nuances, hype, benefits, and more. GIPHY’s Director of Engineering API, Laurence Girard, will be moderating a discussion on “Continuous Health and Monitoring in […]
October 17 – 19, 2018 Microsoft Conference Center Times Square – New York, NY Come join the GIPHY Engineering team at PyData NYC to hear GIPHY CTO, Anthony Johnson give his talk “Word2Vec for GIFs”! PyData conferences are amazing community based events that bring together users and developers of data analysis tools to share ideas […]
GIPHY’s Android team recently released our third major version of the GIPHY app. In the latest release, we focused on delivering new features, redesigning the home page to support GIPHY Stories, and improving our app’s performance. We also delivered an entirely new set of GIF creation tools! Behind these front-facing features for our users, we […]
September 29 – 30, 2018 NYU – New York, NY GIPHY is a proud sponsor of HackNY’s Fall hackathon! You know the drill, you can find our mentors there handing out GIPHY swag, helping teams with their projects and sharing info on how to use the GIPHY API. See below for information on HackNY’s Hackathon […]
September 15 – 16, 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Cambridge, MA For the second year running, we’ll be at HackMIT! With two GIPHY Engineers heading back to their alma mater for the weekend, we’ll be sponosring the hackathon and awarding a prize to the team with the best use of the GIPHY API. […]
GIPHY has popular integrations on many platforms like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, and Slack. We serve tens of billions of requests a month to all integrations via our API. Users search our industry-leading database of GIFs and stickers to find the perfect one to send in all of these messaging platforms. GIPHY’s search engine calculates CTR […]
September 7 – 9, 2018 University of Pennsylvania – Philadelphia, PA GIPHY is a proud sponsor of this year’s PennApps hackathon! You can find our mentors there handing out GIPHY swag, helping teams with their projects and sharing info on how to use the GIPHY API. See below for information on this year’s theme! “As […]
We’re super excited about the recent launch of our GIPHY extension for Twitch! Twitch has put a lot of and work and attention to detail into creating their Extensions platform and we’re excited to be a part of it. If you’ve used GIPHY on Slack, GIPHY for Twitch works in much the same way except […]
At GIPHY, we create a lot of GIFs from live broadcasts –- TV shows, world events, sports games, and more. One of the tools we use to do this is GIPHY Capture – a MacOS app that lets you easily record your screen. Click to record, and click again to stop. Easy! But one unique […]
July 18, 2018 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY GIPHY is excited to host this month’s MusicTech Meetup! MusicTech is a community that supports the people who are defining what music technology will look like in the future. Demos by: Merch Cat, WR1, Radiate and Indie.Ninja Performance by: Kelsey Pyro To sign up and find […]
June 21, 2018 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY GIPHY will host ‘DevOps & Drinks’ a meetup of DevOps Engineers in NYC who get together to discuss real world DevOps strategies with some of the top experts in their field, as well as conversations about the current state of the DevOps job market, employer hiring […]
May 24, 2018 Foursquare HQ – New York, NY Foursquare is hosting its first-ever “Femgineering” lunch in partnership with Union Square Ventures to facilitate impactful conversations around women in tech. The discussion will be led by Shani Offen, a talented Machine Learning Chapter Lead at Spotify. Natalie Weyerhaeuser, a Technical Lead who has worked on […]
May 23 – 24, 2018 SVA Theater – New York, NY LDV Vision Summit, the premier global gathering in visual tech where experts gather to explore how visual tech leveraging computer vision, machine learning & AI are empowering people, businesses and disrupting others. GIPHY is proud to be a part of this year’s LDV Vision […]
NYC Media Lab’s Machines + Media, 2nd annual conference sponsored and hosted by Bloomberg - will focus on new applications of data science and technology in media and journalism.
May 9 – 10, 2018 PIER 27 – San Francisco, CA Train AI, presented by Figure Eight, is a two-day event for machine learning experts, forward-thinking executives, and product and engineering innovators to learn how AI is being applied to real business problems. Train AI features keynotes from industry leaders, real world case studies on […]
Mission Make this jazz corn dance across my terminal window whenever I deploy code via Github. Introduction I’ve been using Hyper, a terminal emulator built with Javascript, for a while now and I love it. It’s built with React, which is the same technology that powers the front-end of GIPHY.com. It’s very customizable and, with […]
March 25, 2018 NYU Tandon School of Engineering – New York, NY GIPHY Engineering is a proud sponsor of ‘Stand Up for the Internet’ – a hackathon on digital citizenship, net neutrality, and privacy hosted by Tech Kids Unlimited (TKU). Students participating in the TKU Hackathon will work to explore issues related to internet health, […]
April 17 – 18, 2018 Mission Bay Conference Center – San Francisco, CA DataEngConf is the first technical conference that bridges the gap between data scientists, data engineers and data analysts. Conference talks focus on examples of real-world architectures of data pipelines and platforms, and applied, practical examples of data science. This year in San […]
INTRODUCTION To follow along, download media files here: https://github.com/cyburgee/ffmpeg-guide If you’ve worked with media encoding in the past decade it’s likely that you’ve come across FFmpeg. For those of you who are unfamiliar, in their words: “FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much […]
March 20, 2018 NYC Data Science Academy – New York, NY GIPHY Engineering will be participating in an event hosted by Dataiku to present examples in which search engines can make or break a product. Our Lead Data Scientist, Yael Elmatad, will be speaking about how we develop our search engine to remain at the […]
Drowning in Data Interactions with GIPHY via our apps and API network are generating 3+ billion events a day. Over the years we’ve built and maintained infrastructure to process and analyze all this data to improve our search algorithm, power our view counts, identify cultural trends, and much more. Today we rely on a combination […]
Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI, is a hot topic these days and at GIPHY this is no foreign term. We work with Google Cloud’s machine learning tools on multiple levels, but ultimately to help you search. To dive deeper into this topic, we sat down with James Maguire from Datamation to provide insight on […]
Introduction In my presentation on GIFs, I focused on how GIFs work and how GIFs compare to modern image formats. Let’s look a bit at modern video formats and see how they compress data. Here at GIPHY, we obviously work a lot with the GIF format, but you might be surprised to learn that we […]
Introduction Everyday here at GIPHY, we have GIFs on GIFs on GIFs uploaded to our platform. In fact, we serve over three billion GIFs a day (that’s a lot of dancing cats!) to over 300 million daily active users. Every upload, however, brings new information and an increasingly large amount of data—this can become a […]
Technology is changing the way we communicate and the way we communicate is driving innovation in technology. GIPHY Engineering is revolutionizing both – when words don’t cut it, say it with GIPHY. Follow us on Twitter @GIPHYENG for all the exciting GIPHY Engineering updates!
Background We have been working on developing the GIPHY Core SDK for the open source community & 3rd party developers. So, if they’re developing an iOS or macOS app, they can easily integrate GIPHY search, trending topics, trending GIFs, Stickers, etc. directly into their apps without needing to re-invent the wheel. We decided to use […]
Editor’s Note: Earlier this week our Director of Engineering, Nick Hasty, was a guest author on the Google Cloud Big Data and ML blog. Nick touched on the use of Google Cloud Machine Learning to analyze and tag our GIFs, ultimately making it easier to find the perfect GIF on GIPHY. The following blog post […]
When singer/songwriter Cassandra Kubinski recently visited the GIPHY office, she got inspired and thought of the idea to create a music video made entirely of GIFs. We weren’t sure if this had ever been done before, but it didn’t really matter – it sounded too fun not to try it ourselves. Cassandra has a great […]
November 15, 2017 FullStack Engineering Meetup – New York, NY “Stacksgiving”, hosted by FullStack Engineering Meetup, will be a night focused on working with time series data. Our very own GIPHY Search Engineer Fiona Candon will be giving a talk titled ‘Time Series on a Time Crunch’. Using GIPHY’s user analytics launch as a case […]
November 14, 2017 GIPHY HQ – New York, NY GIPHY is happily hosting Tech@NYU for their event on ‘Non-Traditional: Unique Paths Into Tech’. During this event attendees will hear from speakers who stumbled into the tech industry and provide insight around how they can do the same. If you’re changing your mind about your major […]
DataEngConf is the first technical conference that bridges the gap between data engineering and data science hosted by Hakka Labs - a community for software engineers, data scientists and data analysts centered around open source data technologies.
For my summer internship on the GIPHY engineering team, I was tasked with extracting image property data from GIFs. Image property data is metadata about the GIF files themselves, particularly attributes that affect human perception and image “quality”, as opposed to content-related metadata. GIPHY can then use this data to do things like build predictive […]
Data Science and Analytics are an important part of what makes GIPHY the best place to find GIFs. We recently teamed up with Interana to help them spread the message of good data analytics practices during their “Summer Data Love Roadshow”. I answered questions from New York area Data Scientists, Product Managers, CEOs, etc along […]
We’re excited to announce the launch of GIPHY Developers: a one-stop shop and interactive resource for developers interested in getting started with GIPHY’s API offerings! By visiting our new portal, aspiring GIPHY developers can read top-level guides as well as detailed technical documentation regarding the GIPHY API’s many endpoints. It’s easier than ever to get […]
January 2018 betaworks HQ – New York, NY Betaworks is rolling out visioncamp, a thematically-driven, frontier tech accelerator focused on the visual computing space, and GIPHY is thrilled to be a part of it. Visioncamp, beginning in January 2018, is the third camp program out of betaworks and will focus on AR, computer vision, and […]
NYC Media Lab is dedicated to connecting digital media and technology companies with New York City's universities to drive innovation, entrepreneurship and talent development. This year they are hosting NYCML'17, a summit bringing the best thinking, projects and talent in digital media from universities in NYC and beyond and GIPHY is excited to be a part of it. GIPHY will be hosting a workshop at our headquarters on SEARCH: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE. During this workshop we'll take you through the history of search algorithms, from pre-digital days to web 2.0.
Okay hotshot, you may know what a GIF is, but how about a Sticker? Give up? A Sticker is an animated GIF with a transparent background, making them the perfect choice for use in presentations, to be dropped into your favorite messaging app via the official GIPHY mobile app, or even to spruce up your […]
In this week's news at GIPHY we are announcing the open-sourcing of the GIPHY SDK. This is the same code that powers some of our own products and will make integrating the GIPHY API even simpler. Available for iOS, Android and various other programming languages, the code can be found on GIthub under the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. Where applicable, binaries are published to public repositories.
Hey! My name is Bethany and I was a software engineering intern on the Search team this summer. I was also a 2017 hackNY fellow. I study computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. In this post, I discuss my internship project: leveraging optical character recognition (OCR) to help you find the perfect GIF. At […]
Jumping into native app development from a web development background can be a monumental task for many. The web development community provides an incredible and seemingly endless supply of resources, free and open source tooling, packages and frameworks to help even intermediate developers build scalable and maintainable interfaces. Given the ubiquitous nature of the web […]
GIPHY is a proud sponsor of University of Michigan's 2017 MHACKS X. A 36 hour hackathon where teams work together to build, code or design projects, aka hacks. GIPHY representatives who will participate in the fun and help pick winners for the best use of the GIPHY API - exciting stuff!
GIPHY partnered with BREAKTHROUGH NY and visited a local high school to talk to them about opportunities in tech, share some info on what GIPHY does and ultimately, get them excited about programming and tech. By participating, GIPHY helps BREAKTHROUGH NY, a non-profit organization, achieve their mission to transform the lives of motivated, low-income students by prepping them for college graduation and succeed in the world.
Founded in the fall of 2009, PennApps was the nation's first student-run college hackathon and GIPHY is a proud sponsor this year! Over a thousand students from the U.S. and other countries like Switzerland, Canada, England, and Singapore will be in Philadelphia for a weekend of creation and discovery. GIPHY is excited to be part of the fun.
Here at GIPHY we work with GIFs every day. Sometimes, however, it pays to stop and ask “What exactly is a GIF?”. Since the format is over thirty years old, it has some real limitations, so it is worth asking: “What are they? What does it do well? And what can’t it do?
The GIF format has a distinctive look, one that we at GIPHY are familiar with. Watch this talk to learn more about how we examine why GIFs look the way they do and a lot more….
GIPHY’s search analytics team has one of the coolest jobs in the world—getting data about the way the world uses GIFs and using that data to make it easier to find the best cat fail. To make this happen, we write ETLs in Scala with Spark and manage them with a Python-based task management tool […]
What was once intended to simply be a fun internal hack day project for GIPHY Maker’s Fair eventually turned into an actualized tool, better known as GIF Paint. We had a hack day here where we (GIPHY employees) were split into pods and spent time building GIF related tools which were then presented to GIPHY […]
Welcome to our new GIPHY Engineering blog! We’ll be using this platform to share stories from GIPHY’s technical teams – the folks who build, run and enhance all of our products, tools and infrastructure. First up, lets talk through what we do. We power GIFs everywhere. Whenever you see a GIF (whether on a social […]
Happy 30th Birthday to the GIF! GIPHY is marking the occasion with TIME_FRAME: A week-long gallery exhibition exploring the history of art online, and demonstrating the power of the GIF as a format that will guide us into the future of visual culture.
Featuring works by over 30 artists, the exhibition includes interactive installations, VR experiments, artist talks, and workshops.
GIPHY is a proud sponsor of HackUC's 24 hour high school hackathon hosted by the Union County Vocational-Technical Schools, a district composed of five schools spanning a variety of subjects from engineering and computer science to health and performing arts.
The first HackUC hackathon was twelve hours and held on June 22nd, 2015. It all started with a huge plan to encourage interest in technology in high schoolers and was a huge success thanks to both the mentors and the students. You can check out some of the projects at hackuc.devpost.com.
To learn more, visit: http://hackuc.com/
GIPHY is hosting an All Star Code site visit for their 2017 summer initiative. All Star Code is an organization dedicated to empowering young men with the skills, networks, and mindset they need to create new futures through technology - focusing primarily on Black and Latino high school males. GIPHY will be opening their office doors to All Star Code and inviting them to learn more about GIPHY, interact with the team and gain insight first-hand into the tech industry.
GIPHY hosted the NYC live stream of Facebook's annual 2-day event, where developers and businesses come together to explore the future of technology. This year’s event was bigger than ever, it included interactive demos, announcements, and best practices that will keep us all looking ahead. GIPHY welcomed local New Yorkers to tune in and discover new features and ways to make the world more open and connected. With the help of GIPHY, there was an F8 for everyone.
GIPHY is a proud sponsor of the 2017 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. Preceding the Disrupt Conference is Hackathon weekend on May 13-14, where developers and engineers descend from all over the world to take part in a 24-hour hacking endurance test. Teams join forces to build a new product, present it on the Disrupt stage to a panel of expert judges for a chance to win a variety of prizes.
Out in Tech unites the LGBTQ+ tech community, they empower aspiring tech leaders to improve our world by showcasing accomplished speakers, producing timely and thought-provoking events, and connecting their members to new opportunities and each other. They provide resources and mentorship to ensure career access for the next generation of LGBTQ youth.
GIPHY hosted a some of the girls who are involved in the #builtbygirls after school program to come to the office and learn more about GIPHY. The girls also participated in a small focus group with our mobile team. Our Director of Mobile Products did an overview of the GIPHY Mobile App and then had girls participate in a brainstorm session and develop fun features that they think added value to the app - it was a great time!
GIPHY hosted students from The Wharton School of UPenn interested in emerging tech startups at the GIPHY office. We gave them an office tour, followed by a Q&A with a few GIPHY employees. This included some folks from all departments including Ops, Partnerships, Finance, Business Development, & Editorial.