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…

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…

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…

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…

Scalable Jetpack Compose Navigation

Introduction For one of my recent personal projects, I decided to make Jetpack Compose a first-class citizen. For me, this meant that my app would use a single activity, and all the navigation would be performed using Compose. When I originally started investigating the feasibility of this, Jetpack Compose Navigation did…

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…

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…

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. …

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…

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…

Aspiring team lead?

Six tips on how to meet deadlines and develop your team When I became a team lead for the first time, I started going to lots of conferences and reading deep books on team management. I was reading all about what I should be and how I should develop, but it was still not clear to me what exactly I should…

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…

Delhi to London : What it’s like to be relocated for a new job!

Since I am from India, I always think in terms of Bollywood movies, where everything is possible. Yes, that’s right…everything. Maybe that is why when I started off with Badoo, I always believed that this was within my reach. If I were to make a Bollywood movie of my journey…

PHP code static analysis based on the example of PHPStan, Phan and Psalm

As a company Badoo has been around for over 12 years now. We have a lot of PHP code (millions of lines of code) and there are probably still strings of code that we use which were written all 12 years ago. Some of them were written back in the…

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…

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…

High-Precision Time: how to use fractional seconds in MySQL and PHP

Once I caught myself thinking about time in databases and realised that I nearly always used time with one-second precision just because it was a common way to it, as well as because that was exactly what was written in manuals in lots of examples. Today, however, this level of…

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…

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…

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…

How to move large-scale React UI-components codebase to TypeScript

Hi, my name is Ivan Grekov and I am a frontend developer at Bumble — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps Our frontend team’s main responsibilities are to deliver new user interfaces and support existing ones across our different applications, mostly within Badoo and Bumble websites. At a…

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…

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.

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…

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…