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…

Rebuilding the Segment Leaderboards Infrastructure — Part 1: Background

The New Training Log

Building a Micro Frontend App in a Month at Strava Background The original Training Log was built and released in 2013. The log is a calendar of an athlete’s activities, represented as color-coded, scaled bubbles based on each activity’s type and stats. Weekly totals summarize the activity for each week and displays progress attained on that week’s goals. Written in Coffeescript…

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…

An Exploration into the Inspiration of Memes

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…

Android Guild Week 2: More Modules

The Art and Science Behind Effective Product Goal Setting

As analysts at Strava, we work on many different subject areas that range from defining how we track the usage of features our teams build and supporting experiments, to sizing opportunities for new projects and investing in forward thinking research. However, one of the most exciting areas that analysts support…

Building the Global Heatmap

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

Product feedback is a gift

Because many of us are athletes…

(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…

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

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…

From data streams to a data lake

Strava’s Lean, Mean, Testing Machine

At Strava…

Engineering Interviewing at Strava

Implementing Beacon on Apple Watch

Beacon — a Summit feature that allows athletes to send a live update of their location to safety contacts. Back in late April, I started implementing Beacon on the Apple Watch. Aside from UI work, adding Beacon support to our Watch app consisted of two parts. The first part was…

Apple Dev Guild Week

The team of developers that works on our iPhone and Apple Watch app spends the majority of its time working on feature development during the year. However, for a week in April the Apple Dev Guild had the opportunity to focus on platform health and the future of what writing…

Android Guild Week: Modularizing our App

Reaching my Summit during my Strava internship

Guild Week at Strava

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

Striving in the Time of COVID-19 — My Second Summer at Strava

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…

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…

iOS Training Log — Drawing striped overlays onto a bubble visualization

Strava recently shipped the (previously web & Android only) Training Log to iOS devices, which represents the athlete’s previous activities using bubbles. A “bubble”, in the context of this post, shows the accumulated volume of some activity dimension (distance, time, etc.) for a given day. This will add up the…