My Summer on Platform at Strava

Airbrake for Scala Services My first project focused on integrating Strava’s Scala microservices with…

Android Guild Week 2: More Modules

The Boring Option

Earlier this month the Strava Foundation Engineering team completed a multi-year project to handle the rollover of activity IDs into a 64 bit integer format. This work culminated with a final year-long project to move read and write access of segment effort data from our monolithic Rails app to behind…

Striving for iOS App Performance

Getting Started This year, Strava achieved a milestone of 1 billion new activities in 18 months*. The first billion activities were recorded over 8 years. Our rapid growth has created new engineering opportunities. One of the focus areas in the past year was our app’s performance. As…

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…

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…

Update to Privacy Zones functionality

Strava’s Longest Intern Ever Interns Again

My journey at Strava began in June 2016 as a summer intern on iOS. I was taking a gap year from school the following year, and ended up staying on the iOS team for the year. I then transferred to the Infrastructure team for my second summer, after which I…

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…

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…

Upgrading Strava to Rails 5.0

At Strava, each of our major platforms (Web, Android, iOS) is known as a Guild. Each Guild likes to keep its platform as up to date as possible so that we get all the new security and performance fixes along with some latest features. This year the Web Guild decided…

Reaching my Summit during my Strava internship

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…

Optimizing Testing For Server Driven Mobile Development at Strava

Hi there 👋I’m Xin Yi, a junior at UC Berkeley studying computer science. The first time I heard about Strava was through my dad, who had become a dedicated user since the day he discovered the app. Of course, being the teenager I was, I dismissed his suggestion…

Upgrading Kafka at Strava

My name is Daniel Schofield and I am a Senior at the University of Maryland. I have had the pleasure of interning at Strava on the Infrastructure team for the past 3 months. While I am an avid runner that has used Strava for a while, my interest…

A summer of Android

I’m Artem, one of the Android interns at Strava in San Francisco during Summer 2019. I’m from Canada and have studied at the University of Manitoba for my Bachelors of Computer Science for the past four years. Team I’m on: During the summer I was on the Experience team, which works on the…

Building Local Legends

Most Strava athletes love competition! Pushing hard to beat someone in the final stretch of a race. Achieving a new personal best at your local road race. Or perhaps simply pushing yourself to keep up with your training partner in a workout. Athletes crave these things, and it drives them…

React Guild Week Vol. 2

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”…

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

Android Guild Week: Modularizing our App

Guild Week at Strava

A Brief History of Guilds at Strava Like most software companies, Strava started off with…

An Exploration into the Inspiration of Memes

Strava’s New End-to-End Testing Setup