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…

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…

Building the Global Heatmap

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

Building Activity Tagging With an Iterative Approach

Have you ever done an activity with a friend, but forgot to record it? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could turn back the clock and remember to record? Or maybe you ran with a friend who didn’t record and you wanted to introduce to Strava. You’re not alone! A…

Distributed Tracing at Strava

In this post, we’ll define distributed tracing, explain our motivation for adoption, and highlight a few scenarios where it can be helpful for operating software. Motivation Once upon a time some 12 years ago, Strava was a single Rails app backed by a couple SQL tables. Fast forward to today…

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…

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…

Strava’s Lean, Mean, Testing Machine

At Strava…

Celebrating Women in Computing at Grace Hopper 2018

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…

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

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…

React Guild Week Vol. 2

Whole lot of heat, not a lot of maps

It takes a team to get FIT

An Improved GAP Model

Our previous model was derived from a laboratory study [1]…

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…

Convert a Universal (FAT) Framework to an XCFramework

Background Strava consumes various third party frameworks via Carthage to power our application. These frameworks are either built from an Xcode project stored in a Github repository (Carthage’s github directive in the Cartfile) or distributed as prebuilt artifacts (Carthage’s binary directive in the Cartfile). The binary dependencies are typically distributed as…

Reaching my Summit during my Strava internship

(re) Building Trust by Doing Less

As engineers, we’re often concerned with doing more. How can we ship more features, handle more scale with our services, or write more code? While there is certainly benefit in learning how to do more, there are also times where intentional restraint can pay off handsomely. I was reminded of…

Guild Week at Strava

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

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…

Strava for Apple Watch: Planning and Project Overview

Strava released its original Apple Watch app shortly after the device’s launch in 2015. In the two year period following the release of our original Apple Watch app we made some incremental improvements, but the overall software architecture never changed…

How to Fix LLDB: Couldn’t IRGen Expression (when using Carthage)

Timeline Strava’s iOS & watchOS code is stored in a single repository. This repository contains all of our code as well as the compiled Carthage dependencies (Carthage/Build/iOS & Carthage/Build/watchOS). This is partly to reduce complexity for any given engineer (since they don’t need to worry about carthage bootstrap) and to avoid…

Impactful Engineering — A Case Study through my Summer at Strava

Hey there! I’m Daniel, a web engineer intern on Strava’s growth team. I’m an incoming senior Computer Science major at UC Berkeley and a Bay Area native. My own Strava story started a few summers ago back in high school. It was back in 10th grade when I bought my…