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Birgit02Data scienceWorking methodsMachine learningWhy AI Hallucinates – and What Technical Writing Can Do About It
Why AI systems hallucinate and how technical writing can help achieve more accurate results through structure, terminology and metadata. ➡️ Read now!
Nina00Data scienceDevelopmentCloudTerraform Tips: Securing Infrastructure-as-Code with Terratest – Part 3
Learn how to test Terraform modules with Terratest, detect errors early on and reliably secure IaC in CI/CD pipelines. 🖥️✔️
Aemilia und Svenja00Data scienceWorking methodsData-Driven Team Development – How OTTO Leads Tech Teams to Success
What makes tech teams truly effective? How we use data-driven team development to measure effectiveness. ➡️ Explore the blogpost
Team Jarvis00DevelopmentMachine learningLearning to Rank is Rocket Science: How Clojure accelerates Our Machine Learning with Deep Neural Networks
Learn how OTTO uses 🖥️ Clojure to build robust machine learning pipelines for learning to rank 🚀 and improves the search experience.- Team Jarvis00Development
Learning to Rank – To the Moon and Back(-propagation): Deep Neural Networks That Learn to Rank What You Love
Learn how OTTO optimizes search relevance using Learning to Rank – and the role Deep Learning plays for our Data Science team. 
Marco00DevelopmentOpen Source at OTTO: Transparency, Community & Innovation
Find out how OTTO lives Open Source – for more transparency, developer satisfaction and digital sovereignty. Read more about our strategy now!
Aashrika00DevelopmentEvents and cultureWorking methodsAWS & GCP – Two Summits, Countless Insights
Our personal insights & highlights ☆ AWS Summit Hamburg & GCP Summit Düsseldorf- Nina00DevelopmentWorking methodsMachine learning
What is an LLM? | Large Language Models explained
Learn how large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT work. An overview of the structure, training & potential of modern language models. 
Marvin00DevelopmentVisualizing Software Architecture with C4 Model
Problems with architecture diagram creation using traditional methods – e.g. UML? Solution: C4 model ► Tips for implementation & use- Andreas00Development
How UV Solves The Hard Problem of Python’s Package Management
Package management in Python ✓ Master challenges with UV package manager ✓ Read more about organization & benefits now! 
Alexander00Data scienceDevelopmentMachine learningAI assistant: From Vector Databases to Multimodal Agents
Optimization of our AI assistant ✓ Use of agent-based modeling ✓ Read more about reasons for optimization & the path now!- Nina00DevelopmentWorking methods
Terraform Tips: Scalable and Reliable Infrastructure-as-Code – Part 2
Optimize directory structure & resource organization ✓ Handling of input & output values ✓ Read more about Terraform Best Practices now! - Nina00DevelopmentWorking methods
Terraform Tips: Scalable and Reliable Infrastructure-as-Code – Part 1
Terraform Best Practices ✓ Define Infrastructure-as-Code ✓ Terraform Lifecycle & Terraform Modules ✓ Read more now! 
COST00DevelopmentCloudHow we used a simple trick to save USD 500,000 in data transfer costs
Increased efficiency of cloud usage ✓ Cost reduction ✓ Migration to dual-stack IPv6 ✓ Find out more now!
Dominik00DevelopmentWorking methodsDeveloper Hacks – Modern Command Line Tools and Advanced Git Commands
In this article, you learn more about a modern development setup, state-of-the-art alternatives to classic shell programs, and advanced git commands.
Team PIT00ArchitectureDevelopmentOperationsAbout the development of genAI assistants AskARev and Searchbuddy
Find out (in a very special way) how the PIT team at Otto Group data.works developed the generative AI-based products AskARev and Searchbuddy.- Nina00DevelopmentOperationsWorking methods
Meet Nina – From Healthcare Management to Software Development
Find out how Nina mastered her career change into software development with the help of her team and her great enthusiasm for IT! 
Fabian00DevelopmentOperationsWorking methodsConfluent Helps Power a Diverse and Scalable Online Shopping Experience for OTTO
Find out how OTTO is taking its 10-year-old data infrastructure into a new era with the event streaming platform powered by Confluent and making itself future-proof.- Jim00Data scienceDevelopmentMachine learning
Machine Learning Ops: What It's Like in Practice
Get an insight into Jim's work as an MLOps-focused engineer! In this article, he explains how a machine learning product is developed and how you can get started in this discipline yourself. - Mirco00Data scienceDevelopment
Spanner's Distributed Nature
At OTTO, Google Cloud Spanner is an integral part of several services. Mirco reveals the complexity of optimizing joins in Google Cloud Spanner and gives some helpful insider tips. 
Falk00DevelopmentEvents and cultureRecap of the EuroRust 2023 conference in Brussels
Kay and Falk were at the EuroRust conference in Brussels in mid-October. There are more and more enthusiasts of the Rust programming language at OTTO. The two of them tell you what went on at the conference and why Rust is a useful tool.
Daniel00DevelopmentSecuritySecurely managing sensitive data with HashiCorp Vault
Almost every application is using sensitive data, such as passwords or other login credentials, to log in to databases, third-party systems and the like. Such data should not end up in plain text in the version control system, but rather be kept under lock and key. For the secure storage of data, the use of Hashicorp Vault has gained acceptance at OTTO.
Christian00DevelopmentWorking methodsDagster: Data Engineering Best Practice during Slack Time
In the inc(AI) team, we are always trying out different tools and methods. Slack time has proven to be a good way of doing this, in which we learn alone or together. The motivation for such Slack time naturally comes from the challenges that we have to solve during our work. Our strategy is to always look to the open source community first to find suitable solutions for us. Some time ago, we also investigated a new tool called Dagster in our Slack time.- Stefanie00ArchitectureDevelopmentWorking methods
How to setup a Kanban board in Jira using sub columns
In this blog post I want to share the evolution of our Kanban board in Jira and how we worked around the missing feature of sub columns. - Christian00DevelopmentMachine learning
ProductGPT – automating the creation of product texts with ChatGPT
Although they've been around for a while, Large Language Models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm since ChatGPT was launched. ChatGPT currently dominates the AI landscape like no other model. Could it also be used for the creation of good product texts in the OTTO Webshop? This is precisely the question we wanted to tackle in the inc(AI) team in a 2-week sprint. The result is ProductGPT – a tool that can do exactly that! - Tobias00Data scienceMachine learning
User centricity beginning with the first keystroke
The majority of user journeys in search starts with a click in a search box. How can you guide your users after this initial click? At otto.de we strive to show our users the best suggestions for their need, right after the first click - Birgit00ArchitectureDevelopmentWorking methods
Why using API Guidelines is a good idea
Working according to a standard... really? Come on – software developers know how to build APIs. Besides, they want to stay flexible and have neither the desire nor the time to plough their way through some endless set of rules. And even if you've read them, that doesn't mean you agree with them. Fair enough. Nevertheless, there are a few challenges to overcome in software development, especially when working in autonomous teams and when you're dealing with business growth. This post offers an insight into how we at OTTO came up with our own API Guidelines and implemented them successfully. 
David00DevelopmentCloudSecurityEnterprise-scaled Self-Healing StackSets
At OTTO, we need to manage several hundred AWS accounts for our product teams while balancing agility and control. That's why OTTO IT's Cloud Competence Center, also known as the Governance at Scale (GAS) team, worked with globaldatanet to develop a solution to run AWS CloudFormation StackSets at Scale, integrated into the OTTO tooling ecosystem with Confluence and Microsoft Teams.- Philipp00DevelopmentCloud
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – keeping Terraform configuration DRY with Terragrunt
The key is to minimize, or even completely eliminate, code repetition by keeping the Terraform configuration DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). This is why we migrated to Terragrunt. It's a small wrapper around Terraform promising reduced repetition, better remote-state configuration, and simpler work with Terraform modules. It can be a viable solution for better organizing configuration files and clearly stating differences between deployment environments. 
Techblogger00Data scienceDevelopmentWorking methodsYesWeHack and OTTO stage Live Bug Bounty Hunting event
At this year's Nullcon Berlin, the international IT security conference that brings hundreds of top experts together, we staged a live Bug Bounty Hunt together with YesWeHack, a leading provider of bug bounty services. Around 40 crack security researchers pitched in to subject OTTO's infrastructure security to a hardcore test. This was a welcome chance for us to check our Web applications for security loopholes and learn from a personal exchange with leading-edge researchers at the same time.
Christian00Data scienceWorking methodsReturn-rate forecasting with survival analysis
Especially in OTTO's retail business, accurately forecasting return rates and their fluctuations plays a major role in minimising unnecessary costs. In large-goods deliveries (fridges, sofas etc.) every single return results in very significant costs.
Michael00Development'Real' real-time programmatic advertising with TensorFlow
In collaboration with Online Marketing, Team Siggi at OTTO BI developed an in-house programmatic advertising solution in 2018. For this purpose, among other elements a separate SSP (Supply Side Platform) and DSP (Demand Side Platform) solution was developed, called Orbidder.
Team Nautik00DevelopmentA Machine Learning approach to real-time display advertising Click here – it’s not an ad, we promise ;-)
Let’s be honest, display advertising usually makes people think of an aggressive e-tailers literally hunting them down. Many potential online customers therefore resort to all-or-nothing ad blockers to save themselves from visual overload. However, beyond these two extreme user experiences, in reality display advertising is simply a modern equivalent to a classic poster hanging at the bus stop.- Techblogger00Development
Rethinking semantic product search: a new approach to queries with unusual spelling variations
In recent years, semantic product search has been widely adopted in global e-commerce. However, many systems exhibit issues in understanding queries with unusual spelling variations. In this blogpost, we show you how Otto’s Team Turing has developed a new system that alleviates these problems. It is live and has lifted the Click-Through Rates (CTR) in the low-recall segments of otto.de by more than 25% and the Conversion Rate (CvR) in the low-hit segment by more than 90%. 
Andreas00DevelopmentKaggle: Machine Learning competition for the best Multi-Objective Recommender System
Major online retailers such as OTTO offer their customers millions of products to explore and purchase. However, finding the right product from such a vast selection without a little guidance can be exhausting! So we work to guide our customers to those products that best match their interests and motivations using personalised recommendations. For this reason we want to enhance our ability to forecast in real time which products each customer will want to see, add to their cart and order at any given moment of their visit.
Josefine00Working methodsHow we work at data.works
Are you interested in data and cloud technology? Would you like to understand more about different roles in development teams? Are you looking for a new job? This blog post series is about our way of working and our job profiles at Otto Group data.works.
Sven00Working methodsHow we work at data.works - Meet Sven
Are you interested in data and cloud technology? Would you like to understand more about different roles in development teams? Are you looking for a new job? This blog post is about our way of working and our job profiles at Otto Group data.works.- Christopher00DevelopmentWorking methodsCloud
Dynamic Pricing for otto.de
The article outlines the basic features of Otto’s Dynamic Pricing service, which is currently used to set prices for the majority of products on otto.de. It further describes how we successfully built the service as a robust and scalable cloud application able to deliver prices for millions of articles on a daily basis. It also explains how we benefited from working on our application in a cross-functional team setup and how we intend to secure the continuous improvement of our service. - Techblogger00Project managementWorking methods
Fully-automated enterprise-scaled provisioning of AWS Accounts via Self-Service using Jira Service Desk
In this article, we’ll demonstrate how to automate the provisioning of AWS Accounts via self-service using Jira Service Desk, potentially reducing the provisioning time of out AWS Accounts from 4 hours to 25 minutes. 
Marco00ArchitectureWorking methodsCloudOTTO's future-ready Event Exchange Platform – with Apache Kafka
When we launched our platform implementation back in 2018, we jointly committed to creating state-of-the-art software aligned with thoroughly modern and proven practices. First off, we deep-dived on modern software architectures including Event Driven, Microservices, Distributed Systems, Cloud Native and DevOps – which resulted in a couple of positive architecture decisions.
Karolis00DevelopmentWorking methodsCloudPower BI: OTTO's reporting vehicle
Following the official introduction of Power BI at OTTO in 2020, it’s quickly become a household name for many colleagues. Others have already taken their first practical steps in using this technology or have even become advanced and regular users - for good reason!- Techblogger00DevelopmentOperationsCloud
The Open Source Private Cloud in the Otto Group
The term ‘cloud’ has been much more than just a buzzword for a long time now. The cloud, or rather the clouds, have become an essential part of our daily business. But what if – even though the wheat has long since been separated from the chaff in terms of IT expertise – I still don't know much about the cloud? 
Manfred00Project managementHow an agile organisation enables scaling
The Business Intelligence Division is playing a decisive role on OTTO's journey towards becoming a connected company. It realigned and transformed itself in 2019 into an agile, adaptable organisational unit. Beyond data and algorithms, BI relies above all on its people and the continuous adaptation of the organisation through joint learning.- Marco00DevelopmentEvents and culture
OTTO's Tech Manifest
OTTO is moving towards a tech-enabled company. Our software is business-related, not abstract. While complying with the requirements of our buying department, we have succeeded in becoming a great platform for customers, partners and suppliers. 
Joscha00DevelopmentMachine Learning Pipelines for Search: Learning to Rank
In this article we will provide some insights into how we built the judgement pipeline, which is to serve as a basis for future LTR pipelines. What does a judgement pipeline do in the LTR context? It computes judgements based on user data for a certain timeframe. These judgements are to serve as the labels a ranking model will be trained on. Right now we also export these judgements for live validation on selected queries.
Andrea00DevelopmentPart 1: Introduction in Learning to Rank for E-Commerce Search
Enabling users to find the products they are looking for is the core job of the search team of otto.de. But not only finding the relevant articles, but also putting the most relevant products at the top of the list is one of the main challenges we are facing in our job. In this and the following posts we will show you how we implemented Learning to Rank to improve our ranking, how we meet the ecommerce specific challenges, measure search quality and how we realized the technical implementation.- Techblogger00ArchitectureDevelopment
Frontends with Microservices – Why the choice of frontend architecture also impacts team collaboration
Over the past few years, microservices have grown into an established architectural approach. They are now so well established and tested that the hype is over, and enough experience is available on the benefits, limits, advantages and disadvantages. This article highlights the advantages or promises of microservice approaches that can be fulfilled when frontends are also considered. - Techblogger00Development
Writing an AWS Lambda using Micronaut
In this article, we will look at one option to write a Java AWS Lambda using the still rather new microframework Micronaut and we’re going to deploy our code to production by means of Serverless. 
Christian00ArchitectureProject managementDeveloping for the OTTO platform: What have we achieved so far?
OTTO is transforming its business model from retailer to platform. Our colleague Christian is developing for the OTTO platform in Hamburg and provides insights into pre-planning, agile project management and the technical architecture.- Techblogger00DevelopmentEvents and culture
Hackathon of the Otto Group IT & Microsoft Azure
Under the claim "Turn your ideas into cloud solutions in 2 days!", the participants of the first Otto Group IT Hackathon at the beginning of April had the goal of developing prototypes with a relevant business case for Otto Group companies. - Techblogger00ArchitectureOperations
OTTO goes AWS - Part 2
The cloud stands for scalability, cost efficiency and short time to market for new features. otto.de also wants to benefit from this and therefore started the migration to AWS last summer. - Techblogger00Project management
Retrospective: Remote Retro with Trello
While looking for a format that could be used well for a remote retro, I had the idea that the desired functions could also be mapped via a Trello board. - Techblogger00ArchitectureProject management
OTTO goes AWS - Part 1
The cloud stands for scalability, cost efficiency and short time to market for new features. otto.de also wants to benefit from this and therefore started the migration to AWS last summer. 
Christian00DevelopmentWith Clojure we get a whole lot of stuff done. Seriously.
In this post I want to emphasize another not less important aspect: Productivity. With Clojure we get a whole lot of stuff done. Seriously.- Techblogger00Project management
How do we use JIRA?
In our “E-Commerce, Innovation & Platform” division, many cross-functional teams use Jira for backlog planning. Here, we answer questions about story preparation. - Techblogger00Testing
Are we really just test managers?
Until now, the term "test manager" was a very wooden, bureaucratic-sounding title. In the meantime, even managing tests is only a small part of the added value we provide as a team.
