Screen navigation in iOS

In this article, we will go through different ways of presenting screens in the iOS app. We will start with most straightforward cases and eventually go through some advanced scenarios. In a nutshell we will be adding more abstraction layers to make our screens decoupled and navigation testable by unit…

The story of the lost commit: how to solve this mystery

It was already evening by the time the developer contacted me. The deadbeef commit patch had disappeared from the master branch. They showed me the evidence: the output from two commands. The first one was: git show deadbeef This showed changes to the file: let’s call it Page.php. The canBeEdited…

A Custom LayoutManager Case: Bumble Beeline

Task

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…

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 —…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Application localisation:

Hello! I’m Alexey Timin, a Senior Software Engineer at Bumble, in charge of localisation system development. Let me tell you more about our localisation system. We work on two products: Badoo and Bumble and operate more than 150,000 phrases and texts, translated into more than 50 languages. Each project has…

MVI beyond state reducers

This is the first part in a series of articles on Android architecture in Badoo. You can find the next one here: Part II — Building a system of reactive components with Kotlin Story time: problems of state Your application has a state at any given time that determines its behaviour and what the user…

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…

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…

Swift 4.1 introduction of compactMap

In functional programming, we have a clear definition for what a flatMap function is supposed to be. The flatMap method takes a list and a transformative function (which expects zero or more values for each transformation), applies the transformative function to each member of the provided list, and produces a…

PHP code static analysis based on the example of PHPStan, Phan and Psalm

As a company Badoo has been around for over 12 years now. We have a lot of PHP code (millions of lines of code) and there are probably still strings of code that we use which were written all 12 years ago. Some of them were written back in the…

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…

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…

Image detection as a service

How we use deep learning and APIs to support our products Across our two apps Badoo and Bumble, we have over millions registered users worldwide uploading millions of photos a day to our platform. These images provide us with a rich data set from which we derive a wealth of insights.

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…

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…

Reactive selfies with Camera2 API on Android — Part 2

This is part two of an article, where I show how you can use RxJava2 to build logic on top of asynchronous API. I chose Android Camera2 API as an example (and didn’t regret it!). This API is not only asynchronous, but also has hidden distinctive implementation features which are…

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…

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…

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…

From zero to Cosmos — Part #1

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 eventually became a complex unification project — a design system called Cosmos. As some of you may know, every good story follows a…