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…

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…

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…

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…

Swipe right on Motion Layout

How to get into the swiping game with the beta version of Motion Layout Google I/O 2019 finished recently and we got our updates on the latest improvement of our favorite SDK. What particularly piqued my interest was the presentation by Nicolas Roard and John Hoford on upcoming functionalities of Constraint Layout, and more precisely, its offspring, MotionLayout. By announcing the release of the…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Introduction of View Styles at Bumble

We are the team behind Badoo and Bumble, two of the world’s largest dating and connection applications with millions of users worldwide. To deal with the challenges that arise with such different products we rely on code reusability, and by so avoiding reinventing the wheel we keep our apps stable…

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.

Achieving State Of The Art Results In Natural Language Processing:

Part 1: Fundamental Concepts Badoo is the largest dating network in the world, with over millions of registered users worldwide. Users of our site are prompted to write an “About me” section in order to give any prospective love interests a little bit more information about themselves.

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…

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…

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…

Volcanic piglet, or do-it-yourself SQL

Collecting, storing and transforming data — these are the main tasks of a data engineer. In any one 24-hour period, Bumble Business Intelligence unit receives and processes over 30 billion events sent from clients’ devices or application servers. Researching and interpreting all this data are not trivial tasks; sometimes it…

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…

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…

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…

Intercepting and redefining modal presentation from a third-party framework

The Problem Some time ago, here at Badoo, we introduced a third-party library to cover our project needs. It was working well, except for one detail: it was presenting UI using iOS modal presentation (typical full screen view controller which is shown from the bottom of the screen), but according to our…

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. —…

What Google I/O 2019 addressed: Android 10, AR-applications and much more

In this article I’ll share my thoughts on Google I/O 2019 that my colleagues and I attended recently (and Badoo were even mentioned in one of the talks). During the three days, there were more than 150 talks, lots of choice as you can see, but I really wanted to…

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…

MVI in Kotlin Multiplatform — part 2 (2 of 3)

This is the second in a series of three articles on MVI architectural pattern in Kotlin Multiplatform. In the article part 1 we reminded ourselves what MVI is and learned how to use it to write shared code using MVI. We defined simple abstractions like Store and View as well…

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…