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…

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…

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…

Client-side neural networks

Historical background The popularity of machine learning and neural networks is growing every day, and faster than we could ever have imagined. Many industry players are contributing, and client-side frameworks are developing rapidly. Many libraries, such as TensorFlow, are constantly releasing new versions. More mobile devices are now receiving hardware support for…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Mutation Testing in PHP: quality measurement for code coverage

How do you evaluate how good your tests are? Many people rely on the most popular score, the one everyone knows — code coverage. But this is a quantitative, rather than a qualitative metric. It shows how much of your code is covered by the tests, but not how well…

Continuous delivery for your Kotlin Multiplatform library

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 — Reaktive Extensions on pure Kotlin. In the case of Kotlin Multiplatform I discovered that continuous integration and continuous delivery require…

Run, config, run: How we speed up config deploy

Configuration files (configs) are an integral part of most applications, but practice shows that they are far from being the most popular topic of discussion. Conversations about configs are mostly limited to discussing working with them directly in the code: how to structure them, whether or not using environmental variables…

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…

Part 2: Deep Learning for Engineers

Introduction to Transfer Learning In this article, we use the concepts we saw in part 1 article to unleash the power of neural networks and the reason for their current popularity, namely their reusability. We learn how we can (partially) automate the feature engineering part and how this opens a new world of possibilities…

Delhi to London : What it’s like to be relocated for a new job!

Since I am from India, I always think in terms of Bollywood movies, where everything is possible. Yes, that’s right…everything. Maybe that is why when I started off with Badoo, I always believed that this was within my reach. If I were to make a Bollywood movie of my journey…

Badoo Android Architectural Journey

A talk presented at the Londroid meetup about the architectural journey of Android development at Badoo. The abstract: At Badoo, we have a long history when it comes to Android development. Since the beginning, the product has experienced huge growth, and our codebase and our team have grown with…

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…

How we achieved a 6x reduction of ANRs. Part 1: Collecting Data

One of the worst things that can happen to your app’s responsiveness is an Application Not Responding (ANR) dialogue. A high ANR rate may affect user experience and, potentially, Google Play search positions and featuring. At the beginning of the year, we had ANR rate above the Google Play threshold…

Deep Neural Networks & Image Captioning

Part 2: Using attention networks to improve the quality of image captions In my previous blog, I introduced the concept of combining a CNN with an LSTM to generate a caption of an image, and talked about how we are using this at Badoo to help our users find love. This time, we will explore how the incorporation of attention networks can…

Bundling C library in Swift framework

In 2014 Apple introduced Swift, a new language for developing applications across its ecosystem. As well as offering various new possibilities and features, it also created some new challenges for those wanting to use good old C libraries. In this article, I will describe one common use case which you…

When pigs fly: optimising bytecode interpreters

“No matter how hard you try, you can’t make a racehorse out of a pig. You can, however, make a faster pig.” — A comment in the Emacs source code. Everyone knows that pigs can’t fly — just like everyone thinks they know that bytecode interpreters, as a technology for…

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…

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…

Swift 4.1 introduction of compactMap

In functional programming, we have a clear definition for what a flatMap function is supposed to be. The flatMap method takes a list and a transformative function (which expects zero or more values for each transformation), applies the transformative function to each member of the provided list, and produces a…

How 3 Process Patterns will change the way you do Test Automation

A few years ago, here at Bumble — the parent company that operates Badoo and Bumble apps — we started to shift towards using autotests more in our development, testing and release processes. We have, however, encountered a few challenges along the way. Before we start, you might be curious…

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. —…