Generating multi-brand multi-platform icons with Sketch and a Node.js script

This is the second part of a post about the creation of a pipeline that can take a Sketch file and export all the icons included in the file, in different formats, for different platforms, with the possibility of AB testing each icon. You can read the first part of…

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…

Top 5 Bumble Android AMA

A few weeks ago, our Bumble — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — Android team hosted their first Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit. It was great! Our Android apps are huge: they have over 1.3 million lines of code, over 210 million downloads on the…

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…

iOS UI development in Badoo

Hey! Being a developer in Badoo is not only interesting and fun, but also challenging — you have to produce highly maintainable code in a short period of time. Due to the amount of new features coming to our team on a weekly basis, we have to think of the…

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…

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…

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.

Singleton, Service Locator and tests in iOS

In this article, I want to review the usage of Singleton and Service Locator patterns in iOS and the reasons why they are often called anti-patterns. We’ll learn when and how to use them, while keeping our code testable. Singleton Singleton is a class which has only one instance existing at…

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…

How to move large-scale React UI-components codebase to TypeScript

Hi, my name is Ivan Grekov and I am a frontend developer at Bumble — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps Our frontend team’s main responsibilities are to deliver new user interfaces and support existing ones across our different applications, mostly within Badoo and Bumble websites. At a…

Features, but faster: the life of an Android developer at Badoo

Practically speaking, my colleagues and I often need to test an idea as fast and as simply as possible. There’s no point spending lots of effort on implementation because we know that if an experiment proves unsuccessful, we are going to jettison the code in question. Here I will be…

Introduction of View Styles at Bumble

We are the team behind Badoo and Bumble, two of the world’s largest dating and connection applications with millions of users worldwide. To deal with the challenges that arise with such different products we rely on code reusability, and by so avoiding reinventing the wheel we keep our apps stable…

From zero to Cosmos — Part #2

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 made its way to become a complex unification project — a design system called Cosmos. From zero to Cosmos — Part #1 The “Re-Think” project …

Cron in Linux: history, use and structure

There is an age-old classical saying that happy people don’t watch the clock. There weren’t any programmers or Unix operating systems in those pre-civilisation times, but in our day programmers know for sure that cron is watching the clock for them. For me, command-line utilities are both a passion and…

How we achieved a 6x reduction of ANRs. Part 2: Fixing ANRs

In the first part, we discussed what ANR is and what are the ways of tracking it. In this article, you will find information on what problems we found in our application, how we fixed them, and the results we achieved. Application Startup The first thing to do if you want to…

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 —…

Checking your app’s paid services without losing money

Checking paid services is crucial in Badoo and Bumble apps testing process. Our applications are integrated with 70 payment providers in 250 countries. This means that bugs at any integration can seriously affect revenues, and in unpredictable ways. In this article, you will learn about methods that we employ in…

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…

Image detection as a service

How we use deep learning and APIs to support our products Across our two apps Badoo and Bumble, we have over millions registered users worldwide uploading millions of photos a day to our platform. These images provide us with a rich data set from which we derive a wealth of insights.

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…

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…

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…

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…

Achieving State Of The Art Results In Natural Language Processing

Part 2: ELMo, BERT and MT-DNN In my previous article I covered some of the fundamental concepts in NLP. This time, I will introduce ELMo, BERT and MT-DNN, architectures which leverage these concepts and have recently achieved some State Of The Art (SOTA) results on NLP tasks. Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo) An introduction to ELMo can be found in this…