It takes a team to get FIT

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…

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…

Introducing developers.strava.com

The goals of the…

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…

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…

From data streams to a data lake

Building the Global Heatmap

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

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…

Engineering Interviewing at Strava

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…

Rebuilding the Segment Leaderboards Infrastructure: Part 4: Accessory Systems

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

React Guild Week Vol. 2

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”…

Celebrating Women in Computing at Grace Hopper 2018

Optimizing Testing For Server Driven Mobile Development at Strava

Hi there 👋I’m Xin Yi, a junior at UC Berkeley studying computer science. The first time I heard about Strava was through my dad, who had become a dedicated user since the day he discovered the app. Of course, being the teenager I was, I dismissed his suggestion…

Android Guild Week: Modularizing our App

Diversity within Strava’s Engineering Organization

At Strava, we believe that building a diverse and inclusive culture is crucial to bringing out the best in our team. Creating a safe space fosters a sense of belonging, where all teammates can be more comfortable sharing their ideas and…

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…

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…

(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…

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…

Striving for iOS App Performance

Getting Started This year, Strava achieved a milestone of 1 billion new activities in 18 months*. The first billion activities were recorded over 8 years. Our rapid growth has created new engineering opportunities. One of the focus areas in the past year was our app’s performance. As…