Modularising the Badoo iOS app

In my previous article, I explained how we singled out the chat functionality in our app for modularisation. Everything had gone well and we were preparing to roll out this experience to start work on modularising all of Badoo iOS app development. We even did a presentation on the approach…

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…

Dub-dub 2019: my take on what’s new at WWDC

In this article I share my impressions of the conference: scroll down for, not just read about important updates and an overview of the sessions, but also something on my own personal feelings, having spent time with a happy crowd of people chanting, “Dub-dub! DC!” and dreaming of shaking Tim…

Crowdtesting

source: pinterest.co.uk It’s been a while since I first heard about crowdsourced testing platforms. It was a time when I had just started to be interested in QA, and when I was browsing Google one day, I found a forum, where a link to the site uTest.com was posted. After a brief…

Checking your app’s paid services without losing money

Checking paid services is crucial in Badoo and Bumble apps testing process. Our applications are integrated with 70 payment providers in 250 countries. This means that bugs at any integration can seriously affect revenues, and in unpredictable ways. In this article, you will learn about methods that we employ in…

Using Hopper to investigate an IOS bug

In this article, I share how we investigated a bug in UIKit, which Apple wasn’t able to solve since the introduction of a new major iOS version until the recent release of iOS 13.4.1. The problem was first noticed in August 2019 with the first beta versions of iOS13. In…

Swift Package Manager builds iOS frameworks (Updated. Xcode 10.2 Beta)

(Updated. Xcode 10.2 Beta) Swift Package Manager doesn’t work with iOS. That’s probably all you can say about the current state of SPM, but insomnia forced me to expand on the issue and compile the following essay. TL;DR Yes, you can build iOS frameworks with Swift Package Manager; Yes, you can adjust settings via .xcconfig…

Mutation Testing in PHP: quality measurement for code coverage

How do you evaluate how good your tests are? Many people rely on the most popular score, the one everyone knows — code coverage. But this is a quantitative, rather than a qualitative metric. It shows how much of your code is covered by the tests, but not how well…

Run, config, run: How we speed up config deploy

Configuration files (configs) are an integral part of most applications, but practice shows that they are far from being the most popular topic of discussion. Conversations about configs are mostly limited to discussing working with them directly in the code: how to structure them, whether or not using environmental variables…

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…

Features, but faster: the life of an Android developer at Badoo

Practically speaking, my colleagues and I often need to test an idea as fast and as simply as possible. There’s no point spending lots of effort on implementation because we know that if an experiment proves unsuccessful, we are going to jettison the code in question. Here I will be…

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…

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…

Badoo Android Architectural Journey

A talk presented at the Londroid meetup about the architectural journey of Android development at Badoo. The abstract: At Badoo, we have a long history when it comes to Android development. Since the beginning, the product has experienced huge growth, and our codebase and our team have grown with…

Generating multi-brand multi-platform icons with Sketch and a Node.js script

This is the second part of a post about the creation of a pipeline that can take a Sketch file and export all the icons included in the file, in different formats, for different platforms, with the possibility of AB testing each icon. You can read the first part of…

Split Testing (A/B Testing) with Swift

Nowadays there are a million apps that solve users’ needs, so it is becoming hard to create something new or be better than market competitors. This has led to a situation where a lot of companies and startups are running experiments to find out which features are actually improving their…

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…

Add Superpowers to your Appium-Android tests

[Update]: I have now pushed this feature in new appium-espresso-driver upstream and it is available out of the box to everyone! Please refer to this medium blog for the latest happening Over the past few years, Appium has become one of the most widely used mobile automation tools. While there…

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…

Optical alignment for frontend developers:

How to align elements in user interfaces. Hi, my name is Ivan Grekov and I work in the front-end team at Badoo. My primary responsibilities entail looking after the user interfaces for a variety of projects. More specifically, this involves working with optical alignment of user interfaces. In this article, I’d like to share with you why…

How we achieved a 6x reduction of ANRs. Part 1: Collecting Data

One of the worst things that can happen to your app’s responsiveness is an Application Not Responding (ANR) dialogue. A high ANR rate may affect user experience and, potentially, Google Play search positions and featuring. At the beginning of the year, we had ANR rate above the Google Play threshold…

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…

MVI in Kotlin Multiplatform — part 3 (3 of 3)

This is the concluding article in a series of three articles on MVI architectural pattern in Kotlin Multiplatform. In the previous two articles (part 1 and part 2) we reminded ourselves what MVI is, created the Kittens module for loading images of kittens, and integrated it into iOS and Android…

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…

When pigs fly: optimising bytecode interpreters

“No matter how hard you try, you can’t make a racehorse out of a pig. You can, however, make a faster pig.” — A comment in the Emacs source code. Everyone knows that pigs can’t fly — just like everyone thinks they know that bytecode interpreters, as a technology for…