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…

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…

Unidirectional data-flow and the Zen of black box components

This is the third part in a series of articles on Android architecture at Badoo. Here are links to the first two: MVI beyond state reducers Building a system of reactive components with Kotlin Don’t stop at loose coupling It’s pretty much generally recognised that loose coupling is better than tight coupling. If you are…

How we tested iOS 12 Beta

I want to share why it’s important to test betas, how we do it in Badoo and what interesting cases we found during our testing of iOS 12 Beta. Why do we test betas?

Singleton, Service Locator and tests in iOS

In this article, I want to review the usage of Singleton and Service Locator patterns in iOS and the reasons why they are often called anti-patterns. We’ll learn when and how to use them, while keeping our code testable. Singleton Singleton is a class which has only one instance existing at…

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…

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…

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…

BPF and Go: Modern forms of introspection in Linux

Everyone has their favourite book about magic. For one person it is Tolkien, for another Pratchett, for a third, like me, it is Max Frei. Today I am going to tell you about my favourite IT magic: BPF and the modern infrastructure surrounding it. BPF is currently at the height…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The secret to great code reviews

Nowadays, lots of people in development use code review recognising it as both helpful and useful. Even if you don’t perform review you probably know what it is. There are loads of code review tools available on the market, complete with use scenarios, recommendations and rules, such as: GitHub, Phabricator…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

PHP Xdebug proxy: when Xdebug’s standard capabilities are insufficient

Xdebug is often used for debugging PHP programs. However, IDE and Xdebug’s standard capabilities are not always sufficient. Some, but not all, problems can be resolved using the Xdebug proxy, pydbgpproxy. This is why I have created a PHP Xdebug proxy based on the asynchronous framework, amphp. In this article…

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…

Regex bytecode interpreter: looking for needles in session haystacks

Here at Badoo, 17 billion events, millions of user sessions and a huge number of virtual dates take place every day. Each event is carefully anonymised and stored in relational databases for subsequent analysis using SQL and SQL-like languages. Contemporary distributed databases containing dozens of terabytes of data are a…

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…

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…

Part 1: Deep Learning for Engineers

Introduction Deep learning has become one of the most discussed topics in the Data Science community. It has long made sense for the Bumble team — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — to use deep learning on a multitude of tasks. With over millions of users around the…