Regex bytecode interpreter: looking for needles in session haystacks

Here at Badoo, 17 billion events, millions of user sessions and a huge number of virtual dates take place every day. Each event is carefully anonymised and stored in relational databases for subsequent analysis using SQL and SQL-like languages. Contemporary distributed databases containing dozens of terabytes of data are 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…

Catching bugs on a client

Our team develops several products, Badoo and Bumble, two of the world’s largest dating and connection applications. For both, we have a web version (desktop and mobile) and mobile applications (Android and iOS). With more than millions of users, it’s important for us to gather client-side errors, and for this…

Deep Neural Networks & Image Captioning

Part 1: Helping our users find love on Badoo Badoo is the largest dating network in the world, with over millions users across 190 countries who upload over 10 million photos per day to our platform. These images provide us with a rich data set we can derive a wealth of insights from. Our Data Science team use image…

Walk or talk at the best QA conferences in 2018

Do you like meeting new people, sharing your knowledge and keeping up-to-date with the latest technology trends? Then you should definitely check your calendar and add there a few upcoming testing events. I started visiting conferences and meetups a few years ago when I was studying at the university. They…

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…

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 —…

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…

Working with a cache: problems and solutions

Hello all! My name is Victor Pryazhnikov and I’m part of the server team at Badoo. Our team is developing and supporting internal API for our customers server-side, caching data is something we deal with every day. Here’s an interesting opinion when it comes to programming: “There are only two…

Covering A/B tests with UI tests:

How to avoid getting tangled up in your own code Hi there! My name is Vitaliy Kotov and I spend most of my time working on automated testing issues at Badoo. In this article, I tell you all about how we have organised the UI testing work with our numerous A/B tests, the problems we have had to deal with…

Guide to mobile app autotesting tools

… for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it’s slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC printed in large friendly letters on its cover. —…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

This is the concluding article in a series of three articles on MVI architectural pattern in Kotlin Multiplatform. In the previous two articles (part 1 and part 2) we reminded ourselves what MVI is, created the Kittens module for loading images of kittens, and integrated it into iOS and Android…

PHP code static analysis based on the example of PHPStan, Phan and Psalm

As a company Badoo has been around for over 12 years now. We have a lot of PHP code (millions of lines of code) and there are probably still strings of code that we use which were written all 12 years ago. Some of them were written back in the…

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…

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…

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…

Add Superpowers to your Appium-Android tests

[Update]: I have now pushed this feature in new appium-espresso-driver upstream and it is available out of the box to everyone! Please refer to this medium blog for the latest happening Over the past few years, Appium has become one of the most widely used mobile automation tools. While there…

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…

Reactive selfies with Camera2 API on Android — Part 2

This is part two of an article, where I show how you can use RxJava2 to build logic on top of asynchronous API. I chose Android Camera2 API as an example (and didn’t regret it!). This API is not only asynchronous, but also has hidden distinctive implementation features which are…

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.

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…