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…

Making custom designable UI components

Hi there! I’m Valera, iOS Padawan at Badoo. Here in our company we are crazy about UI and spend plenty of time designing, polishing and improving the user interface to make our users happy, not only about the services we provide, but also about the look and feel of the…

Delhi to London : What it’s like to be relocated for a new job!

Since I am from India, I always think in terms of Bollywood movies, where everything is possible. Yes, that’s right…everything. Maybe that is why when I started off with Badoo, I always believed that this was within my reach. If I were to make a Bollywood movie of my journey…

Routing for iOS: universal navigation without rewriting the app

What’s wrong with navigation anyway? Almost every app has a navigation between different internal components and it seems like it shouldn’t be a problem. UIKit contains more or less convenient containers like UINavigationController, UITabBarController and a flexible way to present screens modally. We, as developers, just need to use the right tools. However, as soon…

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…

How to use Composite builds as a replacement of buildSrc in Gradle

Gradle buildSrc approach has become standard for implementing custom plugins, tasks and specifying common configurations (like dependencies list and versions) but has one major flaw — it invalidates a build cache when it is changed. On the other hand, Gradle also provides an alternative composite build approach that lacks this…

Data classes in Kotlin: how do they impact an application size

Kotlin has numerous excellent features: null safety, smart casts, string interpolation and more. However, one of its features developers love the most, I have observed, are data classes. They are so well-loved that they are often used where no data class functionality is required. In this article, with the help…

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…

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…

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…

Liveprof will show you how and why the performance of your PHP app changes over time

App performance is one of the key criteria for evaluating developers’ work. Profiler is a tool used for optimising the performance of PHP apps in particular. If you’re seeing an increased response time but you’re not sure which parts of the code are causing it, you can use XHProf to…

Burnt-out workers: is there a way out?

You work at a good company. You are surrounded by great professionals, you earn a decent salary and every day you carry out important and needful tasks. Elon Musk is launching satellites, Boston Dynamics’ robots are getting better and better. The weather is great, the sun is shining, nature is…

Dub-dub 2019: my take on what’s new at WWDC

In this article I share my impressions of the conference: scroll down for, not just read about important updates and an overview of the sessions, but also something on my own personal feelings, having spent time with a happy crowd of people chanting, “Dub-dub! DC!” and dreaming of shaking Tim…

Optimising relational databases with zero downtime

A case study of Badoo’s most loaded database Optimising relational databases is much harder in high-load circumstances: buying an even more powerful hardware is expensive, and one cannot just turn off the app at night to alter the database and migrate data. In this article I would like to tell you how we completely changed the inner structure…

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…

How many people does it take to change a light bulb?

aka API-Centric Development in Non-API Company (Based on a talk by Konstantin Yakushev @ Nordics APIs) The answer is 24, one to hold the light bulb and … Okay, it’s a bad joke, but the number is right and I’ll explain it why later. Today’s topic is how we ended up developing an API-Centric Development environment…

Fixing serialization of Kotlin objects once and for all

Some time ago, I read an article describing a problem experienced with Kotlin objects and serialization using built-in Java methods. The author suggests an amazing solution involving adding the readResolve method to each object implementing java.io.Serializable rather than using instance checks. Despite this approach seemingly being the most correct one…

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…

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…

Mutation Testing in PHP: quality measurement for code coverage

How do you evaluate how good your tests are? Many people rely on the most popular score, the one everyone knows — code coverage. But this is a quantitative, rather than a qualitative metric. It shows how much of your code is covered by the tests, but not how well…

Home-grown bytecode interpreters

In recent decades the use of virtual programming language machines has become very widespread. It is some time since the Java Virtual Machine was first launched in the latter half of the 90s, so we can state with confidence that bytecode interpreters are now very much a reality and not…

PHP Xdebug proxy: when Xdebug’s standard capabilities are insufficient

Xdebug is often used for debugging PHP programs. However, IDE and Xdebug’s standard capabilities are not always sufficient. Some, but not all, problems can be resolved using the Xdebug proxy, pydbgpproxy. This is why I have created a PHP Xdebug proxy based on the asynchronous framework, amphp. In this article…

Crowdtesting

source: pinterest.co.uk It’s been a while since I first heard about crowdsourced testing platforms. It was a time when I had just started to be interested in QA, and when I was browsing Google one day, I found a forum, where a link to the site uTest.com was posted. After a brief…

Achieving State Of The Art Results In Natural Language Processing:

Part 1: Fundamental Concepts Badoo is the largest dating network in the world, with over millions of registered users worldwide. Users of our site are prompted to write an “About me” section in order to give any prospective love interests a little bit more information about themselves.

High-Precision Time: how to use fractional seconds in MySQL and PHP

Once I caught myself thinking about time in databases and realised that I nearly always used time with one-second precision just because it was a common way to it, as well as because that was exactly what was written in manuals in lots of examples. Today, however, this level of…