A monolithic architecture for our clients’ hundreds of versions: how we write and support tests

Like any developer, I really enjoy attending conferences and reading articles. It keeps me up-to-date with what’s going on in software development, as well as be in touch with the tech community. So last December when I was invited to speak at the Highload conference — Russia’s largest professional conference…

Burnt-out workers: is there a way out?

You work at a good company. You are surrounded by great professionals, you earn a decent salary and every day you carry out important and needful tasks. Elon Musk is launching satellites, Boston Dynamics’ robots are getting better and better. The weather is great, the sun is shining, nature is…

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…

PHP Xdebug proxy: when Xdebug’s standard capabilities are insufficient

Xdebug is often used for debugging PHP programs. However, IDE and Xdebug’s standard capabilities are not always sufficient. Some, but not all, problems can be resolved using the Xdebug proxy, pydbgpproxy. This is why I have created a PHP Xdebug proxy based on the asynchronous framework, amphp. In this article…

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…

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…

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…

Fixing serialization of Kotlin objects once and for all

Some time ago, I read an article describing a problem experienced with Kotlin objects and serialization using built-in Java methods. The author suggests an amazing solution involving adding the readResolve method to each object implementing java.io.Serializable rather than using instance checks. Despite this approach seemingly being the most correct one…

Interface localisation: adapting text fields for RTL languages

Adapting applications and sites for right-to-left (RTL) languages is an issue encountered by developers working on many products under development and being introduced onto new markets. There was a point when we at Bumble — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — also found ourselves in this situation…

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…

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…

Reusability as a pattern: from copy-pasting to components

Bumble is developing several applications (i.e: Badoo and Bumble) and each one of them is a separate product with its own features, management, product and engineering teams. However, we all work together in the same office and solve similar problems. Nevertheless, projects have diverged greatly during development. The codebase was…

The secret to great code reviews

Nowadays, lots of people in development use code review recognising it as both helpful and useful. Even if you don’t perform review you probably know what it is. There are loads of code review tools available on the market, complete with use scenarios, recommendations and rules, such as: GitHub, Phabricator…

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…

Home-grown bytecode interpreters

In recent decades the use of virtual programming language machines has become very widespread. It is some time since the Java Virtual Machine was first launched in the latter half of the 90s, so we can state with confidence that bytecode interpreters are now very much a reality and not…

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…

A Custom LayoutManager Case: Bumble Beeline

Task

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…

Universal links for Android and iOS

Sharing between platforms should always work Mobile apps have given a huge amount of good things to the human race, but at the same time, they have broken the internet. Instead of easy-to-understand links to sites which can be copied and shared, now you have to tell people what app to use to access which content. …

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…

WebRTC on Android: how to enable hardware encoding on multiple devices

For video calls on Badoo and Bumble apps, we use WebRTC with H.264 codec. Relying on relevant documentation, you would think that this codec should work seamlessly on any Android device, starting with Android 5.0. However, in practice, it didn’t go exactly this way. This article covers implementation features of…

Volcanic piglet, or do-it-yourself SQL

Collecting, storing and transforming data — these are the main tasks of a data engineer. In any one 24-hour period, Bumble Business Intelligence unit receives and processes over 30 billion events sent from clients’ devices or application servers. Researching and interpreting all this data are not trivial tasks; sometimes it…

Routing for iOS: universal navigation without rewriting the app

What’s wrong with navigation anyway? Almost every app has a navigation between different internal components and it seems like it shouldn’t be a problem. UIKit contains more or less convenient containers like UINavigationController, UITabBarController and a flexible way to present screens modally. We, as developers, just need to use the right tools. However, as soon…

The story of the lost commit: how to solve this mystery

It was already evening by the time the developer contacted me. The deadbeef commit patch had disappeared from the master branch. They showed me the evidence: the output from two commands. The first one was: git show deadbeef This showed changes to the file: let’s call it Page.php. The canBeEdited…

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…