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…

Unidirectional data-flow and the Zen of black box components

This is the third part in a series of articles on Android architecture at Badoo. Here are links to the first two: MVI beyond state reducers Building a system of reactive components with Kotlin Don’t stop at loose coupling It’s pretty much generally recognised that loose coupling is better than tight coupling. If you are…

Implementing UI in iOS: Better, faster, and it scales!

A few months ago I came across a very interesting documentary series on Netflix called Abstract, they basically explore the output of professional designers from different sectors like architecture, graphic design, fashion, … in their workplaces. It was easy to spot some similarities in the work of designers from…

MVI beyond state reducers

This is the first part in a series of articles on Android architecture in Badoo. You can find the next one here: Part II — Building a system of reactive components with Kotlin Story time: problems of state Your application has a state at any given time that determines its behaviour and what the user…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Reaktive binary compatibility: how we achieve it

As part of the Bumble family — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — one of my main projects was involved in the team that created Reaktive library — reactive extensions on pure Kotlin. Whenever possible, any library must maintain binary compatibility. Whenever various versions of a library…

Scalable Jetpack Compose Navigation

Introduction For one of my recent personal projects, I decided to make Jetpack Compose a first-class citizen. For me, this meant that my app would use a single activity, and all the navigation would be performed using Compose. When I originally started investigating the feasibility of this, Jetpack Compose Navigation did…

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…

Part 1: Deep Learning for Engineers

Introduction Deep learning has become one of the most discussed topics in the Data Science community. It has long made sense for the Bumble team — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — to use deep learning on a multitude of tasks. With over millions of users around the…

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…

Jira combats chaos: how to not lose tasks in development

In my previous article I talked about how we configured Jira to make work flow as convenient as possible and to ensure tickets provided exhaustive information. The aim of today’s article is somewhat different. Assumptions: You are developing and providing support for a complex programming product in use by several…

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…

Rolling out automation within a couple of hours: PHPUnit, Selenium and Composer

Hello Medium readers! My name is Vitaliy Kotov and I work at Badoo in the QA department, where I spend a lot of my time on test automation. I was recently faced with the task of rolling out Selenium tests as fast as possible for one of our projects. The…

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…

Informal relationships

Many years ago I joined a company as a developer and soon witnessed something odd. Another department’s teamlead called up one of his subordinates in the middle of the day and told him: ‘Here, come and get this money and go to a store and grab me some drinks and…

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…

BPF and Go: Modern forms of introspection in Linux

Everyone has their favourite book about magic. For one person it is Tolkien, for another Pratchett, for a third, like me, it is Max Frei. Today I am going to tell you about my favourite IT magic: BPF and the modern infrastructure surrounding it. BPF is currently at the height…

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…

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…

Split Testing (A/B Testing) with Swift

Nowadays there are a million apps that solve users’ needs, so it is becoming hard to create something new or be better than market competitors. This has led to a situation where a lot of companies and startups are running experiments to find out which features are actually improving their…

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…