Design Tokens beyond colors, typography, and spacing.

In recent months, I couldn’t help but notice how many people (and companies) when referring to “design tokens” what they actually mean is colors, typography, spacing (and in some cases elevation, timing, and sizing). While this is perfectly true, I think a key part of the picture is missing: design…

Reaktive binary compatibility: how we achieve it

As part of the Bumble family — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — one of my main projects was involved in the team that created Reaktive library — reactive extensions on pure Kotlin. Whenever possible, any library must maintain binary compatibility. Whenever various versions of a library…

The story of the lost commit: how to solve this mystery

It was already evening by the time the developer contacted me. The deadbeef commit patch had disappeared from the master branch. They showed me the evidence: the output from two commands. The first one was: git show deadbeef This showed changes to the file: let’s call it Page.php. The canBeEdited…

#1 — Swift and iOS Ninjas Meetup: videos, slides and questions!

London isn’t just the capital of England — it’s also the capital of many other things. Including avoiding eye contact with people on the tube or trying to give you a free magazine. And it’s the capital of paying £12 for a cocktail because the barman has a beard. But…

Screen navigation in iOS

In this article, we will go through different ways of presenting screens in the iOS app. We will start with most straightforward cases and eventually go through some advanced scenarios. In a nutshell we will be adding more abstraction layers to make our screens decoupled and navigation testable by unit…

Translating Dust templates to JSX

It appeared in the middle of the decade (plagued by the endless JavaScript framework wars), embraced the DOM, shocked everyone by mixing HTML with JavaScript and transformed the web development landscape beyond recognition. All those accomplishments, without even being a framework. Love it or hate it, React…

Bitmap indexes in Go: unbelievable search speed

Foreword My name is Marko and I gave a talk at Gophercon Russia this year about a very interesting kind of indexes called “bitmap indexes”. I wanted to share it with the community, not only in video format, but as an article too. Please enjoy! Additional materials, slides and all…

Interface localisation: adapting text fields for RTL languages

Adapting applications and sites for right-to-left (RTL) languages is an issue encountered by developers working on many products under development and being introduced onto new markets. There was a point when we at Bumble — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — also found ourselves in this situation…

White Box Testing With Appium Espresso Driver

At Badoo, we have techies who strongly believe in contributing to the open source community. This article is about how I contributed a very useful feature called ‘backdoor’ to Appium which solves lots of problems related to Android UI automation. There are a few examples of it in this article…

The secret to great code reviews

Nowadays, lots of people in development use code review recognising it as both helpful and useful. Even if you don’t perform review you probably know what it is. There are loads of code review tools available on the market, complete with use scenarios, recommendations and rules, such as: GitHub, Phabricator…

Intercepting and redefining modal presentation from a third-party framework

The Problem Some time ago, here at Badoo, we introduced a third-party library to cover our project needs. It was working well, except for one detail: it was presenting UI using iOS modal presentation (typical full screen view controller which is shown from the bottom of the screen), but according to our…

Unidirectional data-flow and the Zen of black box components

This is the third part in a series of articles on Android architecture at Badoo. Here are links to the first two: MVI beyond state reducers Building a system of reactive components with Kotlin Don’t stop at loose coupling It’s pretty much generally recognised that loose coupling is better than tight coupling. If you are…

Server-provided animations in iOS apps

Hi everyone! About six months ago we launched one of Badoo’s most exciting features: Live Streaming. One of its main functionalities is that viewers can send gifts to their favourite streamers to express their appreciation. We wanted to make the gifts as fancy and as engaging as possible, so it…

Modularising an iOS app

At Bumble — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — the iOS development team have been involved in creating modules for several years now. A large part of the new code is also being developed outside the apps’ code base. As a result of this work, we now…

Part 1: Deep Learning for Engineers

Introduction Deep learning has become one of the most discussed topics in the Data Science community. It has long made sense for the Bumble team — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — to use deep learning on a multitude of tasks. With over millions of users around the…

Writing Kotlin Parcelize compiler plugin for iOS

This article describes my experience writing a Kotlin compiler plugin. My primary goal was to create a Kotlin compiler plugin for iOS (Kotlin/Native) similar to Android’s kotlin-parcelize. The outcome is the new kotlin-parcelize-darwin plugin. Prologue Even though the main focus of this article is iOS, let’s take a step back and…

Particle systems: a Christmas story

Christmas has always been one of my favourite times of the year. For me, Christmas is a season that brings so much love, laughter, happiness, and other magical things into our lives. I was born and raised in Spain, more specifically in Tenerife, a sunny subtropical island in the middle…

What Google I/O 2019 addressed: Android 10, AR-applications and much more

In this article I’ll share my thoughts on Google I/O 2019 that my colleagues and I attended recently (and Badoo were even mentioned in one of the talks). During the three days, there were more than 150 talks, lots of choice as you can see, but I really wanted to…

Application localisation:

Hello! I’m Alexey Timin, a Senior Software Engineer at Bumble, in charge of localisation system development. Let me tell you more about our localisation system. We work on two products: Badoo and Bumble and operate more than 150,000 phrases and texts, translated into more than 50 languages. Each project has…

From zero to Cosmos — Part #3

This is the story of how a small style guide that was first introduced under the radar, became so appreciated by both developers and designers that it finally became a complex unification project — a design system called Cosmos. From zero to Cosmos — Part #1 From zero to Cosmos —…

Universal links for Android and iOS

Sharing between platforms should always work Mobile apps have given a huge amount of good things to the human race, but at the same time, they have broken the internet. Instead of easy-to-understand links to sites which can be copied and shared, now you have to tell people what app to use to access which content. …

Xcode 10.2, macOS Mojave 10.14.4, iOS 12.1 and other betas

New betas are here and these are some of the most important things that I have learned about them. Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 beta Swift Firstly, the latest Xcode beta is bundled with the following Swift version: Apple Swift version 5.0 (swiftlang-1001.0.45.7 clang-1001.0.37.7) Target: x86_64-apple-darwin18.2.0 ABI version: 0.6 Let’s start with the most exciting news: Swift…

MVI in Kotlin Multiplatform — part 2 (2 of 3)

This is the second in a series of three articles on MVI architectural pattern in Kotlin Multiplatform. In the article part 1 we reminded ourselves what MVI is and learned how to use it to write shared code using MVI. We defined simple abstractions like Store and View as well…

Part 2: Dynamic Delivery in multi-module projects at Bumble

In part 1 of my series of articles, I have already explained to you what Dynamic Delivery is and what API it has. In this article, I describe in detail exactly how I used Dynamic Delivery in our application Bumble and why, in particular, integration was so easy. As a…

Jira combats chaos: how to not lose tasks in development

In my previous article I talked about how we configured Jira to make work flow as convenient as possible and to ensure tickets provided exhaustive information. The aim of today’s article is somewhat different. Assumptions: You are developing and providing support for a complex programming product in use by several…