Covering A/B tests with UI tests:

How to avoid getting tangled up in your own code Hi there! My name is Vitaliy Kotov and I spend most of my time working on automated testing issues at Badoo. In this article, I tell you all about how we have organised the UI testing work with our numerous A/B tests, the problems we have had to deal with…

Fixing serialization of Kotlin objects once and for all

Some time ago, I read an article describing a problem experienced with Kotlin objects and serialization using built-in Java methods. The author suggests an amazing solution involving adding the readResolve method to each object implementing java.io.Serializable rather than using instance checks. Despite this approach seemingly being the most correct one…

Intercepting and redefining modal presentation from a third-party framework

The Problem Some time ago, here at Badoo, we introduced a third-party library to cover our project needs. It was working well, except for one detail: it was presenting UI using iOS modal presentation (typical full screen view controller which is shown from the bottom of the screen), but according to our…

Deep Neural Networks & Image Captioning

Part 2: Using attention networks to improve the quality of image captions In my previous blog, I introduced the concept of combining a CNN with an LSTM to generate a caption of an image, and talked about how we are using this at Badoo to help our users find love. This time, we will explore how the incorporation of attention networks can…

Universal links for Android and iOS

Sharing between platforms should always work Mobile apps have given a huge amount of good things to the human race, but at the same time, they have broken the internet. Instead of easy-to-understand links to sites which can be copied and shared, now you have to tell people what app to use to access which content. …

Jira combats chaos: how to not lose tasks in development

In my previous article I talked about how we configured Jira to make work flow as convenient as possible and to ensure tickets provided exhaustive information. The aim of today’s article is somewhat different. Assumptions: You are developing and providing support for a complex programming product in use by several…

Scalable Jetpack Compose Navigation

Introduction For one of my recent personal projects, I decided to make Jetpack Compose a first-class citizen. For me, this meant that my app would use a single activity, and all the navigation would be performed using Compose. When I originally started investigating the feasibility of this, Jetpack Compose Navigation did…

Interface localisation: adapting text fields for RTL languages

Adapting applications and sites for right-to-left (RTL) languages is an issue encountered by developers working on many products under development and being introduced onto new markets. There was a point when we at Bumble — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — also found ourselves in this situation…

Top 5 Bumble Android AMA

A few weeks ago, our Bumble — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — Android team hosted their first Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit. It was great! Our Android apps are huge: they have over 1.3 million lines of code, over 210 million downloads on the…

When pigs fly: optimising bytecode interpreters

“No matter how hard you try, you can’t make a racehorse out of a pig. You can, however, make a faster pig.” — A comment in the Emacs source code. Everyone knows that pigs can’t fly — just like everyone thinks they know that bytecode interpreters, as a technology for…

Volcanic piglet, or do-it-yourself SQL

Collecting, storing and transforming data — these are the main tasks of a data engineer. In any one 24-hour period, Bumble Business Intelligence unit receives and processes over 30 billion events sent from clients’ devices or application servers. Researching and interpreting all this data are not trivial tasks; sometimes it…

Cron in Linux: history, use and structure

There is an age-old classical saying that happy people don’t watch the clock. There weren’t any programmers or Unix operating systems in those pre-civilisation times, but in our day programmers know for sure that cron is watching the clock for them. For me, command-line utilities are both a passion and…

Bitmap indexes in Go: unbelievable search speed

Foreword My name is Marko and I gave a talk at Gophercon Russia this year about a very interesting kind of indexes called “bitmap indexes”. I wanted to share it with the community, not only in video format, but as an article too. Please enjoy! Additional materials, slides and all…

Burnt-out workers: is there a way out?

You work at a good company. You are surrounded by great professionals, you earn a decent salary and every day you carry out important and needful tasks. Elon Musk is launching satellites, Boston Dynamics’ robots are getting better and better. The weather is great, the sun is shining, nature is…

PHP Xdebug proxy: when Xdebug’s standard capabilities are insufficient

Xdebug is often used for debugging PHP programs. However, IDE and Xdebug’s standard capabilities are not always sufficient. Some, but not all, problems can be resolved using the Xdebug proxy, pydbgpproxy. This is why I have created a PHP Xdebug proxy based on the asynchronous framework, amphp. In this article…

Reaktive binary compatibility: how we achieve it

As part of the Bumble family — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — one of my main projects was involved in the team that created Reaktive library — reactive extensions on pure Kotlin. Whenever possible, any library must maintain binary compatibility. Whenever various versions of a library…

Part 1: Deep Learning for Engineers

Introduction Deep learning has become one of the most discussed topics in the Data Science community. It has long made sense for the Bumble team — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — to use deep learning on a multitude of tasks. With over millions of users around the…

Achieving State Of The Art Results In Natural Language Processing

Part 2: ELMo, BERT and MT-DNN In my previous article I covered some of the fundamental concepts in NLP. This time, I will introduce ELMo, BERT and MT-DNN, architectures which leverage these concepts and have recently achieved some State Of The Art (SOTA) results on NLP tasks. Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo) An introduction to ELMo can be found in this…

From zero to Cosmos — Part #3

This is the story of how a small style guide that was first introduced under the radar, became so appreciated by both developers and designers that it finally became a complex unification project — a design system called Cosmos. From zero to Cosmos — Part #1 From zero to Cosmos —…

Catching bugs on a client

Our team develops several products, Badoo and Bumble, two of the world’s largest dating and connection applications. For both, we have a web version (desktop and mobile) and mobile applications (Android and iOS). With more than millions of users, it’s important for us to gather client-side errors, and for this…

Optical alignment for frontend developers:

How to align elements in user interfaces. Hi, my name is Ivan Grekov and I work in the front-end team at Badoo. My primary responsibilities entail looking after the user interfaces for a variety of projects. More specifically, this involves working with optical alignment of user interfaces. In this article, I’d like to share with you why…

Deep Neural Networks & Image Captioning

Part 1: Helping our users find love on Badoo Badoo is the largest dating network in the world, with over millions users across 190 countries who upload over 10 million photos per day to our platform. These images provide us with a rich data set we can derive a wealth of insights from. Our Data Science team use image…

The secret to great code reviews

Nowadays, lots of people in development use code review recognising it as both helpful and useful. Even if you don’t perform review you probably know what it is. There are loads of code review tools available on the market, complete with use scenarios, recommendations and rules, such as: GitHub, Phabricator…

Rolling out automation within a couple of hours: PHPUnit, Selenium and Composer

Hello Medium readers! My name is Vitaliy Kotov and I work at Badoo in the QA department, where I spend a lot of my time on test automation. I was recently faced with the task of rolling out Selenium tests as fast as possible for one of our projects. The…

System under control — how to automate integration tests

Nobody wants to discover a production service laying down and not working, or even failing to behave as expected, with errors and incorrect data processing. On one occasion, we — Bumble, the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — decided to greatly reduce such inappropriate behaviour through the use…