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…

👍 (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…

Celebrating Women in Computing at Grace Hopper 2018

Guild Week at Strava

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

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…

Strava’s New End-to-End Testing Setup

Activity Grouping: The Heart of a Social Network for Athletes

Scaling Club Leaderboard Infrastructure for Millions of Users

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…

Product feedback is a gift

Because many of us are athletes…

Rebuilding the Segment Leaderboards Infrastructure: Part 4: Accessory Systems

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…

Building the Global Heatmap

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

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

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…

Introducing developers.strava.com

The goals of the…

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…

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…

From data streams to a data lake

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…

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…

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 2: First Principles of a New System

(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 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”…