Engineering Interviewing at Strava

Routes Editing is the Real MVP

Tired, feet sore, and throat hoarse from nothing but networking the previous few days, I happened to glance up and see a booth plastered in athletic graphics. I was at the Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando, Florida, and I didn’t realize it at the moment, but I was looking at…

Rebuilding the Segment Leaderboards Infrastructure — Part 2: First Principles of a New System

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…

A Summer of Strive

When I was offered an internship at Strava, I could not pass up an opportunity to spend the summer in San Francisco. As an…

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

Building the Global Heatmap

700 million activities 1.4 trillion latitude/longitude points 7.7 trillion…

Update to Privacy Zones functionality

Android Launch Performance

As an athlete, two ways to improve performance are building strength or improving efficiency. If you train consistently, you start to see improvements. The path to improving software performance has some similarities like how you might see steady improvements over time, only to reach a temporary plateau before breaking through…

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…

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 1

If you were sitting down to make a ride-tracking platform for cyclists, you’d probably consider storing certain ride details as part of the design. Perhaps you’d pick out some key fields to store like speed, distance, climb, date, time, and bike model. You’d figure a relational database table would work…

Introducing developers.strava.com

The goals of the…

Rebuilding the Segment Leaderboards Infrastructure — Part 1: Background

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…

Rebuilding the Segment Leaderboards Infrastructure: Part 4: Accessory Systems

Running and Scala Services — A Strava Intern Story

Fun. Challenging. Rewarding. This combination of words was not what I expected to experience while working full time at a tech company. I can honestly say that working at Strava has truly set the standard for how I want to be treated at a company, and also the type of…

From data streams to a data lake

You too can strive as a non-traditional intern

Hello everyone, I’m Daniel and I came from a non-traditional coding background. I can’t describe how happy I was when I got an offer for a summer internship at Strava! I worked as an iOS intern alongside a team of amazing web, Android, and iOS engineers. Here, I will tell…

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…

Quantifying Effort through Heart Rate Data

Written by: Chris Spada and Will Meyer One of our most popular Premium features is Suffer Score, a way to quantify effort during an activity using heart rate data. Although Suffer Score has become a popular feature for providing insights into an activity, it…

Erasure

On May 25th, 2018 the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect. It enacted a sweeping set of new regulations intended to provide European citizens better control over their own data. Of concern here is one particular article of GDPR: the right of Erasure. It states: The data…

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”…

Android Guild Week 2: More Modules

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…