Data classes in Kotlin: how do they impact an application size

Kotlin has numerous excellent features: null safety, smart casts, string interpolation and more. However, one of its features developers love the most, I have observed, are data classes. They are so well-loved that they are often used where no data class functionality is required. In this article, with the help…

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…

Using Hopper to investigate an IOS bug

In this article, I share how we investigated a bug in UIKit, which Apple wasn’t able to solve since the introduction of a new major iOS version until the recent release of iOS 13.4.1. The problem was first noticed in August 2019 with the first beta versions of iOS13. In…

From zero to Cosmos — Part #2

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 made its way to become a complex unification project — a design system called Cosmos. From zero to Cosmos — Part #1 The “Re-Think” project …

Liveprof will show you how and why the performance of your PHP app changes over time

App performance is one of the key criteria for evaluating developers’ work. Profiler is a tool used for optimising the performance of PHP apps in particular. If you’re seeing an increased response time but you’re not sure which parts of the code are causing it, you can use XHProf to…

Features, but faster: the life of an Android developer at Badoo

Practically speaking, my colleagues and I often need to test an idea as fast and as simply as possible. There’s no point spending lots of effort on implementation because we know that if an experiment proves unsuccessful, we are going to jettison the code in question. Here I will be…

Modularising the Badoo iOS app

In my previous article, I explained how we singled out the chat functionality in our app for modularisation. Everything had gone well and we were preparing to roll out this experience to start work on modularising all of Badoo iOS app development. We even did a presentation on the approach…

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…

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…

iOS UI development in Badoo

Hey! Being a developer in Badoo is not only interesting and fun, but also challenging — you have to produce highly maintainable code in a short period of time. Due to the amount of new features coming to our team on a weekly basis, we have to think of the…

PHP code static analysis based on the example of PHPStan, Phan and Psalm

As a company Badoo has been around for over 12 years now. We have a lot of PHP code (millions of lines of code) and there are probably still strings of code that we use which were written all 12 years ago. Some of them were written back in the…

Reaktive binary compatibility: how we achieve it

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 — reactive extensions on pure Kotlin. Whenever possible, any library must maintain binary compatibility. Whenever various versions of a library…

From zero to Cosmos — Part #3

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 finally became a complex unification project — a design system called Cosmos. From zero to Cosmos — Part #1 From zero to Cosmos —…

The Immense Benefits Of Not Thinking In Screens

DroidconUK 2019 Lightning Talk Abstract of the talk: Maintaining a large project and not going insane — in practice: – Causes of everyday development pain, frustration and slowdown less frequently talked about – Breaking down the complexity of screens instead of a classical layering approach – Keeping code easy-to-understand…

Swift Package Manager builds iOS frameworks (Updated. Xcode 10.2 Beta)

(Updated. Xcode 10.2 Beta) Swift Package Manager doesn’t work with iOS. That’s probably all you can say about the current state of SPM, but insomnia forced me to expand on the issue and compile the following essay. TL;DR Yes, you can build iOS frameworks with Swift Package Manager; Yes, you can adjust settings via .xcconfig…

Implementing UI in iOS: Better, faster, and it scales!

A few months ago I came across a very interesting documentary series on Netflix called Abstract, they basically explore the output of professional designers from different sectors like architecture, graphic design, fashion, … in their workplaces. It was easy to spot some similarities in the work of designers from…

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…

Add Superpowers to your Appium-Android tests

[Update]: I have now pushed this feature in new appium-espresso-driver upstream and it is available out of the box to everyone! Please refer to this medium blog for the latest happening Over the past few years, Appium has become one of the most widely used mobile automation tools. While there…

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…

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…

Catching bugs on a client

Our team develops several products, Badoo and Bumble, two of the world’s largest dating and connection applications. For both, we have a web version (desktop and mobile) and mobile applications (Android and iOS). With more than millions of users, it’s important for us to gather client-side errors, and for this…

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…

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…

Xcode 10.2, macOS Mojave 10.14.4, iOS 12.1 and other betas

New betas are here and these are some of the most important things that I have learned about them. Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 beta Swift Firstly, the latest Xcode beta is bundled with the following Swift version: Apple Swift version 5.0 (swiftlang-1001.0.45.7 clang-1001.0.37.7) Target: x86_64-apple-darwin18.2.0 ABI version: 0.6 Let’s start with the most exciting news: Swift…

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…