Deep Neural Networks & Image Captioning

Part 1: Helping our users find love on Badoo Badoo is the largest dating network in the world, with over millions users across 190 countries who upload over 10 million photos per day to our platform. These images provide us with a rich data set we can derive a wealth of insights from. Our Data Science team use image…

Design Tokens beyond colors, typography, and spacing.

In recent months, I couldn’t help but notice how many people (and companies) when referring to “design tokens” what they actually mean is colors, typography, spacing (and in some cases elevation, timing, and sizing). While this is perfectly true, I think a key part of the picture is missing: design…

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…

Singleton, Service Locator and tests in iOS

In this article, I want to review the usage of Singleton and Service Locator patterns in iOS and the reasons why they are often called anti-patterns. We’ll learn when and how to use them, while keeping our code testable. Singleton Singleton is a class which has only one instance existing at…

Aspiring team lead?

Six tips on how to meet deadlines and develop your team When I became a team lead for the first time, I started going to lots of conferences and reading deep books on team management. I was reading all about what I should be and how I should develop, but it was still not clear to me what exactly I should…

Regex bytecode interpreter: looking for needles in session haystacks

Here at Badoo, 17 billion events, millions of user sessions and a huge number of virtual dates take place every day. Each event is carefully anonymised and stored in relational databases for subsequent analysis using SQL and SQL-like languages. Contemporary distributed databases containing dozens of terabytes of data are a…

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…

Working with a cache: problems and solutions

Hello all! My name is Victor Pryazhnikov and I’m part of the server team at Badoo. Our team is developing and supporting internal API for our customers server-side, caching data is something we deal with every day. Here’s an interesting opinion when it comes to programming: “There are only two…

White Box Testing With Appium Espresso Driver

At Badoo, we have techies who strongly believe in contributing to the open source community. This article is about how I contributed a very useful feature called ‘backdoor’ to Appium which solves lots of problems related to Android UI automation. There are a few examples of it in this article…

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…

How we achieved a 6x reduction of ANRs. Part 1: Collecting Data

One of the worst things that can happen to your app’s responsiveness is an Application Not Responding (ANR) dialogue. A high ANR rate may affect user experience and, potentially, Google Play search positions and featuring. At the beginning of the year, we had ANR rate above the Google Play threshold…

Split Testing (A/B Testing) with Swift

Nowadays there are a million apps that solve users’ needs, so it is becoming hard to create something new or be better than market competitors. This has led to a situation where a lot of companies and startups are running experiments to find out which features are actually improving their…

Reaktive — a multiplatform library for reactive Kotlin

Reactive programming is really popular today not least because it has loads of plus points: the absence of what is called ‘callback hell’; a built-in mechanism for processing errors; and a functional programming style that reduces the likelihood of bugs occurring. It makes it much easier to write multi-threaded code…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

A Custom LayoutManager Case: Bumble Beeline

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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…

Bundling C library in Swift framework

In 2014 Apple introduced Swift, a new language for developing applications across its ecosystem. As well as offering various new possibilities and features, it also created some new challenges for those wanting to use good old C libraries. In this article, I will describe one common use case which you…

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…

Cron in Linux: history, use and structure

There is an age-old classical saying that happy people don’t watch the clock. There weren’t any programmers or Unix operating systems in those pre-civilisation times, but in our day programmers know for sure that cron is watching the clock for them. For me, command-line utilities are both a passion and…

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…

Part 2: Dynamic Delivery in multi-module projects at Bumble

In part 1 of my series of articles, I have already explained to you what Dynamic Delivery is and what API it has. In this article, I describe in detail exactly how I used Dynamic Delivery in our application Bumble and why, in particular, integration was so easy. As a…