React Guild Week Vol. 2

An Improved GAP Model

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

Engineering Interviewing at Strava

Update to Privacy Zones functionality

Reaching my Summit during my Strava internship

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…

Android Launch Performance

As an athlete, two ways to improve performance are building strength or improving efficiency. If you train consistently, you start to see improvements. The path to improving software performance has some similarities like how you might see steady improvements over time, only to reach a temporary plateau before breaking through…

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…

The New Training Log

Building a Micro Frontend App in a Month at Strava Background The original Training Log was built and released in 2013. The log is a calendar of an athlete’s activities, represented as color-coded, scaled bubbles based on each activity’s type and stats. Weekly totals summarize the activity for each week and displays progress attained on that week’s goals. Written in Coffeescript…

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”…

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…

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…

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…

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 the Global Heatmap

700 million activities 1.4 trillion latitude/longitude points 7.7 trillion…

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…

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…

My Summer on Platform at Strava

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

Whole lot of heat, not a lot of maps

Android Guild Week: Modularizing our App

Routes Editing is the Real MVP

Tired, feet sore, and throat hoarse from nothing but networking the previous few days, I happened to glance up and see a booth plastered in athletic graphics. I was at the Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando, Florida, and I didn’t realize it at the moment, but I was looking at…

Rebuilding the Segment Leaderboards Infrastructure — Part 3: Design of the New System

It takes a team to get FIT

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

Introducing developers.strava.com

The goals of the…