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…

Reusability as a pattern: from copy-pasting to components

Bumble is developing several applications (i.e: Badoo and Bumble) and each one of them is a separate product with its own features, management, product and engineering teams. However, we all work together in the same office and solve similar problems. Nevertheless, projects have diverged greatly during development. The codebase was…

Server-provided animations in iOS apps

Hi everyone! About six months ago we launched one of Badoo’s most exciting features: Live Streaming. One of its main functionalities is that viewers can send gifts to their favourite streamers to express their appreciation. We wanted to make the gifts as fancy and as engaging as possible, so it…

Walk or talk at the best QA conferences in 2018

Do you like meeting new people, sharing your knowledge and keeping up-to-date with the latest technology trends? Then you should definitely check your calendar and add there a few upcoming testing events. I started visiting conferences and meetups a few years ago when I was studying at the university. They…

Continuous delivery for your Kotlin Multiplatform library

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 — Reaktive Extensions on pure Kotlin. In the case of Kotlin Multiplatform I discovered that continuous integration and continuous delivery require…

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…

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…

Writing Kotlin Parcelize compiler plugin for iOS

This article describes my experience writing a Kotlin compiler plugin. My primary goal was to create a Kotlin compiler plugin for iOS (Kotlin/Native) similar to Android’s kotlin-parcelize. The outcome is the new kotlin-parcelize-darwin plugin. Prologue Even though the main focus of this article is iOS, let’s take a step back and…

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. —…

A monolithic architecture for our clients’ hundreds of versions: how we write and support tests

Like any developer, I really enjoy attending conferences and reading articles. It keeps me up-to-date with what’s going on in software development, as well as be in touch with the tech community. So last December when I was invited to speak at the Highload conference — Russia’s largest professional conference…

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. …

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…

Particle systems: a Christmas story

Christmas has always been one of my favourite times of the year. For me, Christmas is a season that brings so much love, laughter, happiness, and other magical things into our lives. I was born and raised in Spain, more specifically in Tenerife, a sunny subtropical island in the middle…

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…

Routing for iOS: universal navigation without rewriting the app

What’s wrong with navigation anyway? Almost every app has a navigation between different internal components and it seems like it shouldn’t be a problem. UIKit contains more or less convenient containers like UINavigationController, UITabBarController and a flexible way to present screens modally. We, as developers, just need to use the right tools. However, as soon…

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

TL;DR Using a custom build script in Node JS, it is possible to manipulate a series of Sketch files, and then, using an internal Sketch tool, automatically export their assets, to generate multiple icon libraries, for multiple platforms and different brands, that support dynamic colourisation of the assets via design tokens…

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…

Optimising relational databases with zero downtime

A case study of Badoo’s most loaded database Optimising relational databases is much harder in high-load circumstances: buying an even more powerful hardware is expensive, and one cannot just turn off the app at night to alter the database and migrate data. In this article I would like to tell you how we completely changed the inner structure…

iOS UI development in Badoo

Hey! Being a developer in Badoo is not only interesting and fun, but also challenging — you have to produce highly maintainable code in a short period of time. Due to the amount of new features coming to our team on a weekly basis, we have to think of the…

Client-side neural networks

Historical background The popularity of machine learning and neural networks is growing every day, and faster than we could ever have imagined. Many industry players are contributing, and client-side frameworks are developing rapidly. Many libraries, such as TensorFlow, are constantly releasing new versions. More mobile devices are now receiving hardware support for…

Deep Neural Networks & Image Captioning

Part 1: Helping our users find love on Badoo Badoo is the largest dating network in the world, with over millions users across 190 countries who upload over 10 million photos per day to our platform. These images provide us with a rich data set we can derive a wealth of insights from. Our Data Science team use image…

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…

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…

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…