Informal relationships

Many years ago I joined a company as a developer and soon witnessed something odd. Another department’s teamlead called up one of his subordinates in the middle of the day and told him: ‘Here, come and get this money and go to a store and grab me some drinks and…

High-Precision Time: how to use fractional seconds in MySQL and PHP

Once I caught myself thinking about time in databases and realised that I nearly always used time with one-second precision just because it was a common way to it, as well as because that was exactly what was written in manuals in lots of examples. Today, however, this level of…

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…

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…

The Immense Benefits Of Not Thinking In Screens

DroidconUK 2019 Lightning Talk Abstract of the talk: Maintaining a large project and not going insane — in practice: – Causes of everyday development pain, frustration and slowdown less frequently talked about – Breaking down the complexity of screens instead of a classical layering approach – Keeping code easy-to-understand…

Delhi to London : What it’s like to be relocated for a new job!

Since I am from India, I always think in terms of Bollywood movies, where everything is possible. Yes, that’s right…everything. Maybe that is why when I started off with Badoo, I always believed that this was within my reach. If I were to make a Bollywood movie of my journey…

Guide to mobile app autotesting tools

… for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it’s slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC printed in large friendly letters on its cover. —…

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…

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…

How to use Composite builds as a replacement of buildSrc in Gradle

Gradle buildSrc approach has become standard for implementing custom plugins, tasks and specifying common configurations (like dependencies list and versions) but has one major flaw — it invalidates a build cache when it is changed. On the other hand, Gradle also provides an alternative composite build approach that lacks this…

Part 2: Dynamic Delivery in multi-module projects at Bumble

In part 1 of my series of articles, I have already explained to you what Dynamic Delivery is and what API it has. In this article, I describe in detail exactly how I used Dynamic Delivery in our application Bumble and why, in particular, integration was so easy. As a…

Part 1: Dynamic Delivery in multi-module projects at Bumble

Dynamic Delivery is a technology which allows you to install and delete parts of an application while the application is working, in order to reduce the space it occupied. If there are functions not being used, what is the point of a user having them on their device? In part…

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…

Configuring Jira for your needs

Perfect flow and ideal ticket If you work in an IT company then the likelihood is that your processes are built around Atlassian’s well-known Jira. There are numerous task-trackers available on the market for solving such tasks, including open-source solutions (Trac, Redmine, Bugzilla), but Jira is probably the most widely used. My name is Dmitry…

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. …

How 3 Process Patterns will change the way you do Test Automation

A few years ago, here at Bumble — the parent company that operates Badoo and Bumble apps — we started to shift towards using autotests more in our development, testing and release processes. We have, however, encountered a few challenges along the way. Before we start, you might be curious…

Mistakes Unity novices make, based on first-hand experience

Hi, all. It’s me again, Ilya Kudinov, QA engineer at Badoo. Today I am not going to talk about testing but about gamedev. No, this isn’t something we do at Badoo; developing computer games is a hobby of mine. Industry professionals, don’t be harsh in your judgement. All the advice…

Modularising an iOS app

At Bumble — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — the iOS development team have been involved in creating modules for several years now. A large part of the new code is also being developed outside the apps’ code base. As a result of this work, we now…

Part 2: Deep Learning for Engineers

Introduction to Transfer Learning In this article, we use the concepts we saw in part 1 article to unleash the power of neural networks and the reason for their current popularity, namely their reusability. We learn how we can (partially) automate the feature engineering part and how this opens a new world of possibilities…

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…

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…

Implementing UI in iOS: Better, faster, and it scales!

A few months ago I came across a very interesting documentary series on Netflix called Abstract, they basically explore the output of professional designers from different sectors like architecture, graphic design, fashion, … in their workplaces. It was easy to spot some similarities in the work of designers from…

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…

WebRTC on Android: how to enable hardware encoding on multiple devices

For video calls on Badoo and Bumble apps, we use WebRTC with H.264 codec. Relying on relevant documentation, you would think that this codec should work seamlessly on any Android device, starting with Android 5.0. However, in practice, it didn’t go exactly this way. This article covers implementation features of…

Working with a cache: problems and solutions

Hello all! My name is Victor Pryazhnikov and I’m part of the server team at Badoo. Our team is developing and supporting internal API for our customers server-side, caching data is something we deal with every day. Here’s an interesting opinion when it comes to programming: “There are only two…