Scala Practices that Powered Streak Challenges

This summer, I helped implement streak challenges at Strava by working on the new challenges infrastructure as an intern on the API team. This entailed implementing and deploying two new Scala services, which introduced me to several cool things like Scala, how Kafka works and how to deploy a Docker…

Update to Privacy Zones functionality

Experimenting with GraphQL

Our mobile apps make a lot of requests when they boot and our REST APIs are difficult to optimize for the exact data any one version…

Of Software and Strive at Strava

I’ll be graduating from UC Berkeley this year with a major in Data Science and emphasis in human-computer interaction. I used Strava throughout my days as a runner in high school…

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…

Product feedback is a gift

Because many of us are athletes…

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…

Introducing developers.strava.com

The goals of the…

Impactful Engineering — A Case Study through my Summer at Strava

Hey there! I’m Daniel, a web engineer intern on Strava’s growth team. I’m an incoming senior Computer Science major at UC Berkeley and a Bay Area native. My own Strava story started a few summers ago back in high school. It was back in 10th grade when I bought my…

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…

Celebrating Women in Computing at Grace Hopper 2018

Whole lot of heat, not a lot of maps

A summer of Android

I’m Artem, one of the Android interns at Strava in San Francisco during Summer 2019. I’m from Canada and have studied at the University of Manitoba for my Bachelors of Computer Science for the past four years. Team I’m on: During the summer I was on the Experience team, which works on the…

Scaling Club Leaderboard Infrastructure for Millions of Users

Strava’s New End-to-End Testing Setup

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…

Rebuilding the Segment Leaderboards Infrastructure: Part 4: Accessory Systems

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…

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…

Guild Week at Strava

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

Android Guild Week: Modularizing our App

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…

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…

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”…

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…