white text on a red background that reads "Friday Five, Tracy Favro, Lead Cyber Analyst" with a small image of Target mascot Bullseye the white bull terrier with a red Target bullseye around his eye

Playwright

Profile of Tracy Favro, Lead Cybersecurity Analyst at Target

"Friday Five" Featuring Tracy Favro, Lead Cybersecurity Analyst

Screenshot of top third of a Feature Doc example, titled "Overview." The image includes sections titled "Feature Objective," "Feature Status," and "Feature Scope" with sections listed titled "Feature Deliverables," "Out of Scope & Future Considerations," and "Dependencies & Blockers"

How Feature Docs can improve communication between teams and shrink onboarding times 

Cultivating a Strong Product Engineering Culture Through Feature Documents 

Interior shot of a meeting in a corporate Target office, with a man in a checked button down shirt sitting next to a woman looking at a laptop and smiling, and another man in a dark colored sweater sitting to her other side

Software Engineer

Read tips on how to take control of your career path.

Self-Management for Software Engineers 

Learn how Target Infrastructure engineers built a fully automated firmware update system.

Firmware Updates: What They Are and Why They Matter 

a person's hand holding a smart phone with a grocery list on the screen, including items like apples, orange juice, granola, and eggs

Linguist

Target’s Data Science team shares an inside look at our Buy It Again model.

Elevating Guest Repurchasing Behavior Using Buy It Again Recommendations 

Team member scans inventory in Target electronics aisle

Read about how Target uses AI to improve product availability in stores.

Solving for Product Availability with AI

A diagram of a mobile device interacting with Point of Sale devices via POSSUM web APIs

Learn about our newest open source product which provides hardware abstraction for industry standard retail peripherals.

Introducing POSSUM, An Open Source Retail Peripheral Platform for All 

A Target Team Member is fulfilling a Drive Up order with a guest at their car.

Sr Something

Learn more about Target's Eventing API that makes our Drive Up service possible.

Building a Flexible Platform to Power Target Drive Up 

graphic describing the three ways in which cyber capabilities apply to ORC - research the adversary, prevent and detect attacks, and investigate and respond 

How Target's cyber team collaborates to combat fraud 

Applying Cyber Principles to Combatting Organized Retail Crime 

cartoon drawing of a smiling child with pigtails, glasses, and braces on her teeth. she's smiling widely while holding a beautiful teapot with hearts popping up around her head.

How art and design principles are applied to designing tech repositories at Target.

Designing Engineering

TAC Architecture model showing a sequence dataset on the left with an arrow flowing right to a multi-layered model training, with an arrow to the right pointing to a representation of real time recommendations with model files and recommended items

A look at our Data Science team's patent-pending AI recommendation model

Target AutoComplete: Real Time Item Recommendations at Target 

Target's patented EasySweep skimmer detection device, shown with a payment terminal that is safe to use, and one with a skimming device installed that puts guest data at risk

Target's patented EasySweep device protects guests' data from skimmers.

Target's EasySweep – Simplifying Skimmer Detection for All

example of an image (a hand-drawn camping scene with a tent, kayak, and river) shown in original format, with a lower image contrast, and then with CSS filters reapplied

Learnings from the recent Smashingconf, and how they apply to the Web team's work at Target.

Sharing Knowledge on Image Optimization Using Internal Blogs

map of the world with blue dots indicating edge locations, with high concentrations in India, southeast Asia, central Europe, Brazil, and the eastern United States

Deep dive on edge computing and edge functions and how they can be used.

What is Edge Computing and How Can it Improve Your Website’s Performance? 

diagram showing how inputs from the Target web or mobile app feed into a personalization engine that flows through to three microservices that get their data from a Hadoop cluster, model files, and feed back into the microservices and to the feature store before being routed back to the consumer

Dinosaur guy

How Target's Personalization team uses microservices to improve our guest experience

Real-Time Personalization Using Microservices 

Identity Management Day 2023 logo on the left with round fingerprint-like design behind the words, and headshot of Target Senior Director of Cyber Solutions Tom Sheffield who is pictured smiling wearing a blue button down shirt and gray blazer against a red couch, with red carpet and atrium in the background

Interview with Senior Director Tom Sheffield to explore what Identity Management means at Target.

Moving from "Or" to "And"

Target Cybersecurity Analyst Dat Dang, pictured smiling against a corporate conference room background, wearing eyeglasses, a button-down shirt, and navy blue blazer

Profile of Target Lead Cybersecurity Analyst Dat Dang

"Friday Five" -  Featuring Dat Dang, Lead Cybersecurity Analyst

status page screenshot from Gogs showing a Docker pipeline with a malicious config file called "evil.local:8080/payload"

software engineer

An actionable incident response playbook for your CI/CD pipeline.

CI/CD Pipeline Incident Response

Target Senior Engineer Kaylee Edwards, with long blonde hair, smiling and wearing a white button down shirt and black cardigan. She is standing next to Target's mascot Bullseye, a white bull terrier with red Target logo around his eye. They appear in front of a background of colorful balloons.

Profile of Target Senior Engineer Kaylee Edwards

“Friday Five” Featuring Kaylee Edwards, Senior Engineer – Agile and Engineering Enablement

two Target engineers, photographed from the back, looking at a laptop screen together. The person on the left side has short dark hair and is wearing a black sweatshirt, the person on the left has long blueish green hair and is wearing a black top with a white pattern

Here are three perspectives on the 50 Days of Learning mobile apps summer learning hours effort.

Do You Know What We Did Last Summer?

light purple rectangle with five white circles in a horizontal line, each with a white icon inside. From left to right, icons include a sheet of paper with lines, a gear with tools against a browser window, a large white robot, a screen with circular arrows, and a check mark in a white circle

This post provides a solution for utilizing synthetic events for the purpose of validating signature integrity and functionality, with the goal of achieving continuous assurance of a system’s detection signatures.

Synthetics: Continuous Assurance of Detection Components

A woman with short blonde hair wearing a tan and white striped shirt and denim overalls uses a self-checkout register in a Target store to purchase a basket of grocery items.

Sr Engineer lol

A deep dive on Target's Enterprise Cart & Checkout (ECCO) platform - the underlying technology that powers our checkout experience across Target.com, the Target mobile app, and nearly 2,000 stores. 

Target’s ECCO Platform: Achieving Resiliency and High Availability

Senior AI Engineer, Data Sciences (Guest and Digital)

How two Target cybersecurity team members reimagined their mentorship relationship and what they learned

Target tech x BUiLT: Technical Mentorship, Reimagined

rocky outcrop of a mountain with a gnarled tree growing out from the stones, with a beautiful cloudy mountain scene in the background

How Target uses chaos experiments to test the resilience of our architecture.

Chaos Leads to Resilience

Camp Cyber logo with a line drawing of a nighttime camping scene, and "Camp Cyber" written in letters that look like logs, next to headshot of Target CISO Rich Agostino

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, recognized annually in the United States since 2004 as an opportunity to educate people about steps they can take to enhance the security of their digital worlds.

Cybersecurity “State of the State” 

Joana Cruz and Connie Yu, pictured presenting on stage, in discussion  and standing smiling with former Target CIO Mike McNamara, wearing red shirts with white Target bullseye logos and conference nametag lanyards

One way our team loves to celebrate women in technology is through the annual Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC).

Meet Target Tech’s Grace Hopper Conference Presenters

a series of five white icons in circles on a lavender background, from the far left icons picture a device that appears to have a variety of connections to it, an icon of a sheet of paper with lines on it, a cute dog icon with a space helmet, a sheet of paper with a magnifying glass above it, and an icon of a browser window

Strelka is a real-time, container-based, file scanning system used for threat hunting, threat detection, and incident response, built by our Target cybersecurity team.

Strelka: Real-Time Threat Hunting Scanner

logo for Target Tech Kids with a red Target bullseye logo on the left, and the the words "tech kids" spelled out in black, with a red robot icon in place of the "i" in "kids"

Target Tech Kids (TTK) is a philanthropic effort that delivers STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education and resources for K-8 students, with a focus on underserved communities with low rates of subject matter exposure. We established the program in 2018 and this year we plan to share our passion with our biggest in-person event yet at the Minnesota State Fair's STEM Day celebration!

Target Tech Kids: Spotlight on STEM

red Target bullseye logo with stylized dark grey letters spelling "ryse" in line and to the right of the bullseye

Ryse software engineering coaches empower Target tech team members with the knowledge and enterprise tools they need to build the future of retail technology. Ryse coaches are engineers, developers, advocates, instructors, facilitators, and cultural change agents – all in one. We tackle some of the organizations’ biggest technical alignment issues, serve as advisors and advocates for technologies and patterns in use throughout the organization, and run experiments across the company to test new ways of working and learning together.

How Target's Ryse Coaching Team Brings Learning Close in a Virtual World

image of Target mascot Bullseye, a white bull terrier with a red target around his eye, looking at an open laptop against a red background

Horror Author

When Target HQ first started to use chat systems, those systems allowed simple emoji usage, quickly turning :-) into 😀, and a few other simple faces. As chat technology evolved, Unicode standardized more sophisticated emoji. Eventually, many chat systems allowed administrators and sometimes users to add custom emoji. This gave us some leeway and ability to get creative when it came to what emoji to use when chatting internally at Target.

👍 Custom Emoji Management: How Target enhances its tech culture with creativity 🎨 and technology 🕹

diagram of Target system architecture with tenants listed on top (retail, analytical, and IT) with three buckets of components for each listed below. Retail components (shared services, aggregations, and core data), analytical (aggregations, analytical data sets, historic core) and IT (matching the retail components)

In 2017, Target announced that we had prioritized stores at the center of how we serve our guests – no matter how they choose to shop. To make this store-as-hubs model work, we spent several years redesigning operations and modernizing how we conduct business. We invested billions of dollars into remodeling stores, hardened our world-class supply chain, and created a robust suite of fulfillment options to meet every guest need.

Hardening the Registers: A Cascading Failure of Edge Induced Fault Tolerance

diagram showing a hypothetical POS architecture, with a register on top, flowing into a box labeled "cart service," that then flows ID data into three buckets named price, promo, and item, each flowing into separate databases labeled "PromoDB"

Across Target.com and nearly 2,000 stores, we run a complex and highly distributed point of sale (POS) ecosystem. And as we invest heavily in a great omnichannel POS experience, we continue to develop and scale new features for a variety of applications including store registers and self-checkout, our team members’ handheld myDevices, and our award-winning guest mobile app. As a result, we manage more software with a growing number of interactions – a single scan of an item during checkout could mean touching a distributed tree of dozens of services, with hundreds of thousands of these done per minute.

Triaging in Target’s Distributed Point of Sale Ecosystem

Graph showing a process beginning with a complicated schema that is fed through GraphQL, followed by an ideation phase with clients, feeding into a query repo, then through an API engine, ending with the visual representation of serving three APIs to three unique client apps.

The digital catalog team at Target is responsible for a collection of nearly 100 aggregated APIs to provide browse data for Target.com and mobile app platforms. In early 2019, we were just coming off a large backend migration which meant we would need to version a lot of these APIs. This was a huge effort for all teams involved in standing up and moving to new API versions. With the volume of APIs that needed testing, we needed a solution that would scale and allow our teams to move more quickly. 

The Journey of Building a Self-Service Platform for Aggregated APIs

Black and red copy on white background with Target bullseye logo announcing Target tech's Product Engineering Conference on May 19

Our product engineering organization builds a large proportion of the applications that our millions of guests and 350,000+ team members use, from the mobile app and website to our point-of-sale software, to the HQ systems supporting our operations. These are the technologies that help bring Target’s purpose to life and grow our business online and across nearly 2,000 stores nationwide. The key to success is really knowing and supporting our users across the country.

Product Engineering @ Target: Engaging With Our ‘Why'

List of file names that get increasingly more complex, HighLevelOverview_Final, HighLevelOverview_FINALFINAL, etc.

This is an adaptation of a presentation delivered to conferences including Write the Docs Portland 2020, Ohio Linuxfest OpenLibreFree 2020, and FOSDEM 2021. The presentation source is available at GitHub and recordings are available on YouTube. This is a two-part post that will share both the requirements and execution of the documentation workflow we built that is now used by many of our teammates and leaders. Read part two here.

Requirements for Creating a Documentation Workflow Loved by Both Data Scientists and Engineers

word cloud with large words reading "pandoc" "mactex" "crossref" and smaller words around reading things like "make" and "docker" and "citeproc" among others

This post is the second in a two-part series about creating a documentation workflow for data scientists and engineers. Click here to read the first post. This is an adaptation of a presentation delivered to conferences including Write the Docs Portland 2020, Ohio Linuxfest OpenLibreFree 2020, and FOSDEM 2021. The presentation source is available at GitHub and recordings are available on YouTube.

Executing a Documentation Workflow

This image shows a line graph with the y axis of "latency" metrics from 0-400 measured in milliseconds, and a x axis showing "model type" with five BERT models listed. The graph shows a green upward trend line from 25 to 350 ms.

How we chose and implemented an effective model to generate embeddings in real-time.  Target has been exploring, leveraging, and releasing open source software for several years now, and we are seeing positive impact to how we work together already. In early 2021, our recommendations team started to consider real-time natural language input from guests, such as search queries, Instagram posts, and product reviews, because these signals can be useful for personalized product recommendations. We planned to generate representations of those guest inputs using the open source Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model.

Using BERT Model to Generate Real-time Embeddings

three side-by-side images of mobile phones against red backgrounds, the first one says "see upcoming shifts" and shows that functionality on the phone screen below, the middle image "view your weekly schedule," and the third image reads "check for available shifts"

Target has spent the last several years modernizing our technology stack and advancing our in-house development capabilities. We’ve grown to a global team of over 4,500 incredibly talented technologists and created a culture of testing, learning, and agile processes to great success. This journey has led to an uptick in fantastic new homegrown innovations that help make Target a joyful place to shop and work.

myTime for Target: Built for Target by Target

Target SVP pictured in front of bookshelves, wearing a down vest and glasses on the left side, next to a screenshot of a Powerpoint slide reading "Target's Infrastructure Journey" 

Target's cloud journey started about a decade ago. First there was Amazon Web Services (AWS). Followed by IBM Cloud. Then Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We have since expanded to a Hybrid-Multi-Cloud architecture with GCP and Microsoft Azure.

The Journey to a Hybrid-Multi-Cloud

screenshot of code snippet describing a payload wallet rule with Eric Brandel listed as author

Author

We recently introduced Target’s cybersecurity tool “Merry Maker” and open sourced the framework to help others protect against digital skimming.

Behind the Scenes of Merry Maker

Target store team member pictured wearing a Santa hat with holiday decor shelves behind him. The team member is showing something on a device to a young girl with a light purple coat on, and she looks surprised and happy

Credit card skimmers are custom-made additions to payment devices (like ATMs or gas pumps) that criminals build and use to steal a consumer’s payment information.

Meet Merry Maker: How Target Protects Against Digital Skimming

graph called "PR merge time" with time on the y-axis, and dates on the x-axis. the graph is on a black background with bars in green, yellow, orange, and red showing a breakdown of merge time per day from April 15-September 27

Our team within Engineering Enablement serves our engineers so they can build the technology products that are used every day by our guests, team members, and partners.

Review Scrutiny

screen capture from a Zoom call showing 36 small screens with one Target engineer in each box. The first three engineers in the top left of the image have "Congrats" in big letters behind them.

This past July, Target tech celebrated the first 24 team members to complete our Emerging Engineers Program. 

Redefining Traditional Pathways to Engineering Careers at Target

diagram showing the application of patterns on legacy applications. Steps are listed numerically as follows: 1. initial data load, 2. cutover to new modern UI; turn off old, 3. Shim back changes to legacy data source, 4. Enable new data source interfaces, 5. Onboard consumers to modern data sources, 6. Decommission when all legacy consumers are gone

At Target we’re always evolving our business to meet the needs of our guests and team members — which means we’re also always evolving how we build technology.

Modernizing Data Sources Using Shims

image of four Target engineers seated at a table working on their four individual laptops 

Science Fiction Writer

How embedding as a software engineer results in learning and empathy.

50 Days of Learning: One Week as an Engineer

GoAlert logo with a red thought bubble containing small red dog wagging its tail next to the words "GoAlert"

Open Source GoAlert Is Now Available At https://github.com/target/goalert

GoAlert - Now Available in Open Source

screenshot showing a screen of code representing "Execute Kafka-DB test" that was run 14 minutes ago and lasted for 2 minutes, 56 seconds. the code on the screen shows the initialization of the process and successful test process completing

Musician

Our team developed a service that reads from a Kafka topic, interacts with a Postgres database using basic CRUD operations, and calls APIs on an external service.

Using Drone for Automated Integration Testing

outline of the word 'chaos' filled in with a maze-like design, with the word 'engineering' in block letters underneath

Writer

Novelist and Poet

Ɔhaos Ǝnginǝǝring @ Target - Part 2

four Target engineers pictured in discussion sitting around an office conference room table, with laptops open

During a recent penetration test, Target's Security Testing Services team found that Microsoft's SharePoint was vulnerable to a unique attack that, unlike typical cross-site scripting, could be exploited without any interaction from the victim user.

Target Finds Cross-Site Scripting in Microsoft SharePoint

Target Measuremint logo - a smiley cartoon red and white peppermint wearing Target red and khaki, holding a ruler and measuring tool

A few years ago, Target started a journey to move into a product-based organization with dedicated, durable, full-stack teams. 

GoAlert - Your Future Open Source, On-Call Notification Product

Poet / Writer

Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.

Ɔhaos Ǝnginǝǝring @ Target - Part 1

light gray map of the United States with over 1800 small red dots indicating Target store locations

Running Cassandra in Kubernetes Across 1,800 Stores

At the beginning of 2017...
... our engineering team embarked on a journey to facilitate rapid software delivery to Target stores to better enable innovation and more quickly respond to ever-evolving business needs.

Meet Target’s Stores Deployment Interface that Realizes Distributed Edge Computing at Retail Scale

Novelist

This blog post is a follow-up to a presentation given at Fastly's Altitude NYC conference on April 17, 2018.

Is Target Becoming Retail’s Newest Tech Giant?

Target Cybersecurity Team Earns Top Honors at Annual Cyber Summit

Work somewhere you love.

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