An Exploration into the Inspiration of Memes

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…

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…

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…

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

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…

React Guild Week Vol. 2

Introducing developers.strava.com

The goals of the…

Rebuilding the Segment Leaderboards Infrastructure — Part 1: Background

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…

Running and Scala Services — A Strava Intern Story

Fun. Challenging. Rewarding. This combination of words was not what I expected to experience while working full time at a tech company. I can honestly say that working at Strava has truly set the standard for how I want to be treated at a company, and also the type of…

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…

Strava’s New End-to-End Testing Setup

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…

Quantifying Effort through Heart Rate Data

Written by: Chris Spada and Will Meyer One of our most popular Premium features is Suffer Score, a way to quantify effort during an activity using heart rate data. Although Suffer Score has become a popular feature for providing insights into an activity, it…

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…

👍 (Kudos) Reacts Only

I remember the first day of my internship quite clearly — dressing classy not trashy (no need, everyone wears athleisure 24/7), timing myself to arrive exactly on time, and steeling myself in front of the door before realizing it was locked. I was one minute late. Damn. We started with…

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…

From data streams to a data lake

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…

Building Local Legends

Most Strava athletes love competition! Pushing hard to beat someone in the final stretch of a race. Achieving a new personal best at your local road race. Or perhaps simply pushing yourself to keep up with your training partner in a workout. Athletes crave these things, and it drives them…

It takes a team to get FIT

Erasure

On May 25th, 2018 the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect. It enacted a sweeping set of new regulations intended to provide European citizens better control over their own data. Of concern here is one particular article of GDPR: the right of Erasure. It states: The data…

An Improved GAP Model

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

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…