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…

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…

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…

Product feedback is a gift

Because many of us are athletes…

Update to Privacy Zones functionality

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…

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…

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…

React Guild Week Vol. 2

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…

An Improved GAP Model

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

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 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…

My Summer on Platform at Strava

Airbrake for Scala Services My first project focused on integrating Strava’s Scala microservices with…

Guild Week at Strava

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

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…

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…

Convert a Universal (FAT) Framework to an XCFramework

Background Strava consumes various third party frameworks via Carthage to power our application. These frameworks are either built from an Xcode project stored in a Github repository (Carthage’s github directive in the Cartfile) or distributed as prebuilt artifacts (Carthage’s binary directive in the Cartfile). The binary dependencies are typically distributed as…

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”…

Striving for iOS App Performance

Getting Started This year, Strava achieved a milestone of 1 billion new activities in 18 months*. The first billion activities were recorded over 8 years. Our rapid growth has created new engineering opportunities. One of the focus areas in the past year was our app’s performance. As…

An Exploration into the Inspiration of Memes

A Summer of Strive

When I was offered an internship at Strava, I could not pass up an opportunity to spend the summer in San Francisco. As an…

Strava’s New End-to-End Testing Setup

Android Guild Week: Modularizing our App