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…

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…

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…

Implementing Beacon on Apple Watch

Beacon — a Summit feature that allows athletes to send a live update of their location to safety contacts. Back in late April, I started implementing Beacon on the Apple Watch. Aside from UI work, adding Beacon support to our Watch app consisted of two parts. The first part was…

Android Guild Week: Modularizing our App

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…

React Guild Week Vol. 2

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…

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…

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…

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

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 Guild Week 2: More Modules

Rebuilding the Segment Leaderboards Infrastructure — Part 2: First Principles of a New System

Strava’s Lean, Mean, Testing Machine

At Strava…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

An Improved GAP Model

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

An Exploration into the Inspiration of Memes

Product feedback is a gift

Because many of us are athletes…

My Summer on Platform at Strava

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

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…