Optical alignment for frontend developers:

How to align elements in user interfaces. Hi, my name is Ivan Grekov and I work in the front-end team at Badoo. My primary responsibilities entail looking after the user interfaces for a variety of projects. More specifically, this involves working with optical alignment of user interfaces. In this article, I’d like to share with you why…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

From zero to Cosmos — Part #1

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 eventually became a complex unification project — a design system called Cosmos. As some of you may know, every good story follows a…

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…

Swipe right on Motion Layout

How to get into the swiping game with the beta version of Motion Layout Google I/O 2019 finished recently and we got our updates on the latest improvement of our favorite SDK. What particularly piqued my interest was the presentation by Nicolas Roard and John Hoford on upcoming functionalities of Constraint Layout, and more precisely, its offspring, MotionLayout. By announcing the release of the…

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…

A Custom LayoutManager Case: Bumble Beeline

Task

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…

Part 1: Dynamic Delivery in multi-module projects at Bumble

Dynamic Delivery is a technology which allows you to install and delete parts of an application while the application is working, in order to reduce the space it occupied. If there are functions not being used, what is the point of a user having them on their device? In part…

Particle systems: a Christmas story

Christmas has always been one of my favourite times of the year. For me, Christmas is a season that brings so much love, laughter, happiness, and other magical things into our lives. I was born and raised in Spain, more specifically in Tenerife, a sunny subtropical island in the middle…

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…

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…

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…

Modularising the Badoo iOS app

In my previous article, I explained how we singled out the chat functionality in our app for modularisation. Everything had gone well and we were preparing to roll out this experience to start work on modularising all of Badoo iOS app development. We even did a presentation on the approach…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The Immense Benefits Of Not Thinking In Screens

DroidconUK 2019 Lightning Talk Abstract of the talk: Maintaining a large project and not going insane — in practice: – Causes of everyday development pain, frustration and slowdown less frequently talked about – Breaking down the complexity of screens instead of a classical layering approach – Keeping code easy-to-understand…