React Guild Week Vol. 2

Android Guild Week: Modularizing our App

Reaching my Summit during my Strava internship

The Art and Science Behind Effective Product Goal Setting

As analysts at Strava, we work on many different subject areas that range from defining how we track the usage of features our teams build and supporting experiments, to sizing opportunities for new projects and investing in forward thinking research. However, one of the most exciting areas that analysts support…

Update to Privacy Zones functionality

Distributed Tracing at Strava

In this post, we’ll define distributed tracing, explain our motivation for adoption, and highlight a few scenarios where it can be helpful for operating software. Motivation Once upon a time some 12 years ago, Strava was a single Rails app backed by a couple SQL tables. Fast forward to today…

The New Training Log

Building a Micro Frontend App in a Month at Strava Background The original Training Log was built and released in 2013. The log is a calendar of an athlete’s activities, represented as color-coded, scaled bubbles based on each activity’s type and stats. Weekly totals summarize the activity for each week and displays progress attained on that week’s goals. Written in Coffeescript…

A Richer Activity, Part 2

Background Over the last year, the Strava API Team has been working to build a service which can persist new types of activity data. This is the second in a series of blog posts about this initiative. Part 1 provided…

Product feedback is a gift

Because many of us are athletes…

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…

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…

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…

Diversity within Strava’s Engineering Organization

At Strava, we believe that building a diverse and inclusive culture is crucial to bringing out the best in our team. Creating a safe space fosters a sense of belonging, where all teammates can be more comfortable sharing their ideas and…

Strava for Apple Watch: Planning and Project Overview

Strava released its original Apple Watch app shortly after the device’s launch in 2015. In the two year period following the release of our original Apple Watch app we made some incremental improvements, but the overall software architecture never changed…

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…

Android Guild Week 2: More Modules

Strava’s New End-to-End Testing Setup

Rebuilding the Segment Leaderboards Infrastructure — Part 3: Design of the New System

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”…

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…

Celebrating Women in Computing at Grace Hopper 2018

iOS Training Log — Drawing striped overlays onto a bubble visualization

Strava recently shipped the (previously web & Android only) Training Log to iOS devices, which represents the athlete’s previous activities using bubbles. A “bubble”, in the context of this post, shows the accumulated volume of some activity dimension (distance, time, etc.) for a given day. This will add up the…

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…

Scaling Club Leaderboard Infrastructure for Millions of Users

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…