Scala Practices that Powered Streak Challenges

This summer, I helped implement streak challenges at Strava by working on the new challenges infrastructure as an intern on the API team. This entailed implementing and deploying two new Scala services, which introduced me to several cool things like Scala, how Kafka works and how to deploy a Docker…

The Team The Team The Team

Ten months ago, I had finished the “hard part” of applying for internships — endless applications, hours of preparation, and numerous coding interviews. I thought the “easy part”…

Striving in the Time of COVID-19 — My Second Summer at Strava

Striving for iOS App Performance

Getting Started This year, Strava achieved a milestone of 1 billion new activities in 18 months*. The first billion activities were recorded over 8 years. Our rapid growth has created new engineering opportunities. One of the focus areas in the past year was our app’s performance. As…

Android Launch Performance

As an athlete, two ways to improve performance are building strength or improving efficiency. If you train consistently, you start to see improvements. The path to improving software performance has some similarities like how you might see steady improvements over time, only to reach a temporary plateau before breaking through…

Upgrading Kafka at Strava

My name is Daniel Schofield and I am a Senior at the University of Maryland. I have had the pleasure of interning at Strava on the Infrastructure team for the past 3 months. While I am an avid runner that has used Strava for a while, my interest…

Experimenting with GraphQL

Our mobile apps make a lot of requests when they boot and our REST APIs are difficult to optimize for the exact data any one version…

A summer of Android

I’m Artem, one of the Android interns at Strava in San Francisco during Summer 2019. I’m from Canada and have studied at the University of Manitoba for my Bachelors of Computer Science for the past four years. Team I’m on: During the summer I was on the Experience team, which works on the…

Implementing Beacon on Apple Watch

Beacon — a Summit feature that allows athletes to send a live update of their location to safety contacts. Back in late April, I started implementing Beacon on the Apple Watch. Aside from UI work, adding Beacon support to our Watch app consisted of two parts. The first part was…

Rebuilding the Segment Leaderboards Infrastructure — Part 1: Background

An Improved GAP Model

Our previous model was derived from a laboratory study [1]…

Activity Grouping: The Heart of a Social Network for Athletes

It takes a team to get FIT

A Richer Activity, Part 1

If you were sitting down to make a ride-tracking platform for cyclists, you’d probably consider storing certain ride details as part of the design. Perhaps you’d pick out some key fields to store like speed, distance, climb, date, time, and bike model. You’d figure a relational database table would work…

Building Activity Tagging With an Iterative Approach

Have you ever done an activity with a friend, but forgot to record it? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could turn back the clock and remember to record? Or maybe you ran with a friend who didn’t record and you wanted to introduce to Strava. You’re not alone! A…

Impactful Engineering — A Case Study through my Summer at Strava

Hey there! I’m Daniel, a web engineer intern on Strava’s growth team. I’m an incoming senior Computer Science major at UC Berkeley and a Bay Area native. My own Strava story started a few summers ago back in high school. It was back in 10th grade when I bought my…

Reaching my Summit during my Strava internship

Building the Global Heatmap

700 million activities 1.4 trillion latitude/longitude points 7.7 trillion…

Scaling Club Leaderboard Infrastructure for Millions of Users

Of Software and Strive at Strava

I’ll be graduating from UC Berkeley this year with a major in Data Science and emphasis in human-computer interaction. I used Strava throughout my days as a runner in high school…

How to Fix LLDB: Couldn’t IRGen Expression (when using Carthage)

Timeline Strava’s iOS & watchOS code is stored in a single repository. This repository contains all of our code as well as the compiled Carthage dependencies (Carthage/Build/iOS & Carthage/Build/watchOS). This is partly to reduce complexity for any given engineer (since they don’t need to worry about carthage bootstrap) and to avoid…

Apple Dev Guild Week

The team of developers that works on our iPhone and Apple Watch app spends the majority of its time working on feature development during the year. However, for a week in April the Apple Dev Guild had the opportunity to focus on platform health and the future of what writing…

Upgrading Strava to Rails 5.0

At Strava, each of our major platforms (Web, Android, iOS) is known as a Guild. Each Guild likes to keep its platform as up to date as possible so that we get all the new security and performance fixes along with some latest features. This year the Web Guild decided…

Building Local Legends

Most Strava athletes love competition! Pushing hard to beat someone in the final stretch of a race. Achieving a new personal best at your local road race. Or perhaps simply pushing yourself to keep up with your training partner in a workout. Athletes crave these things, and it drives them…

Time to Learn React!

The web guild at Strava is responsible for maintaining and improving the Ruby/Rails/JavaScript/CSS platform, processes, and culture. We believe that an up-to-date, modern web platform is not only more secure and faster, but also makes our engineers more productive and happier. As part of a company wide Guild Week, during…