Scaling Club Leaderboard Infrastructure for Millions of Users

The Art and Science Behind Effective Product Goal Setting

As analysts at Strava, we work on many different subject areas that range from defining how we track the usage of features our teams build and supporting experiments, to sizing opportunities for new projects and investing in forward thinking research. However, one of the most exciting areas that analysts support…

Convert a Universal (FAT) Framework to an XCFramework

Background Strava consumes various third party frameworks via Carthage to power our application. These frameworks are either built from an Xcode project stored in a Github repository (Carthage’s github directive in the Cartfile) or distributed as prebuilt artifacts (Carthage’s binary directive in the Cartfile). The binary dependencies are typically distributed as…

Distributed Tracing at Strava

In this post, we’ll define distributed tracing, explain our motivation for adoption, and highlight a few scenarios where it can be helpful for operating software. Motivation Once upon a time some 12 years ago, Strava was a single Rails app backed by a couple SQL tables. Fast forward to today…

The Boring Option

Earlier this month the Strava Foundation Engineering team completed a multi-year project to handle the rollover of activity IDs into a 64 bit integer format. This work culminated with a final year-long project to move read and write access of segment effort data from our monolithic Rails app to behind…

How to Fix LLDB: Couldn’t IRGen Expression (when using Carthage)

Timeline Strava’s iOS & watchOS code is stored in a single repository. This repository contains all of our code as well as the compiled Carthage dependencies (Carthage/Build/iOS & Carthage/Build/watchOS). This is partly to reduce complexity for any given engineer (since they don’t need to worry about carthage bootstrap) and to avoid…

Building Local Legends

Most Strava athletes love competition! Pushing hard to beat someone in the final stretch of a race. Achieving a new personal best at your local road race. Or perhaps simply pushing yourself to keep up with your training partner in a workout. Athletes crave these things, and it drives them…

The New Training Log

Building a Micro Frontend App in a Month at Strava Background The original Training Log was built and released in 2013. The log is a calendar of an athlete’s activities, represented as color-coded, scaled bubbles based on each activity’s type and stats. Weekly totals summarize the activity for each week and displays progress attained on that week’s goals. Written in Coffeescript…

Striving in the Time of COVID-19 — My Second Summer at Strava

Routes Editing is the Real MVP

Tired, feet sore, and throat hoarse from nothing but networking the previous few days, I happened to glance up and see a booth plastered in athletic graphics. I was at the Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando, Florida, and I didn’t realize it at the moment, but I was looking at…

Whole lot of heat, not a lot of maps

Product feedback is a gift

Because many of us are athletes…

iOS Training Log — Drawing striped overlays onto a bubble visualization

Strava recently shipped the (previously web & Android only) Training Log to iOS devices, which represents the athlete’s previous activities using bubbles. A “bubble”, in the context of this post, shows the accumulated volume of some activity dimension (distance, time, etc.) for a given day. This will add up the…

Striving for iOS App Performance

Getting Started This year, Strava achieved a milestone of 1 billion new activities in 18 months*. The first billion activities were recorded over 8 years. Our rapid growth has created new engineering opportunities. One of the focus areas in the past year was our app’s performance. As…

(re) Building Trust by Doing Less

As engineers, we’re often concerned with doing more. How can we ship more features, handle more scale with our services, or write more code? While there is certainly benefit in learning how to do more, there are also times where intentional restraint can pay off handsomely. I was reminded of…

My Summer on Platform at Strava

Airbrake for Scala Services My first project focused on integrating Strava’s Scala microservices with…

Of Software and Strive at Strava

I’ll be graduating from UC Berkeley this year with a major in Data Science and emphasis in human-computer interaction. I used Strava throughout my days as a runner in high school…

Impactful Engineering — A Case Study through my Summer at Strava

Hey there! I’m Daniel, a web engineer intern on Strava’s growth team. I’m an incoming senior Computer Science major at UC Berkeley and a Bay Area native. My own Strava story started a few summers ago back in high school. It was back in 10th grade when I bought my…

A summer of Android

I’m Artem, one of the Android interns at Strava in San Francisco during Summer 2019. I’m from Canada and have studied at the University of Manitoba for my Bachelors of Computer Science for the past four years. Team I’m on: During the summer I was on the Experience team, which works on the…

The Team The Team The Team

Ten months ago, I had finished the “hard part” of applying for internships — endless applications, hours of preparation, and numerous coding interviews. I thought the “easy part”…

It takes a team to get FIT

You too can strive as a non-traditional intern

Hello everyone, I’m Daniel and I came from a non-traditional coding background. I can’t describe how happy I was when I got an offer for a summer internship at Strava! I worked as an iOS intern alongside a team of amazing web, Android, and iOS engineers. Here, I will tell…

Scala Practices that Powered Streak Challenges

This summer, I helped implement streak challenges at Strava by working on the new challenges infrastructure as an intern on the API team. This entailed implementing and deploying two new Scala services, which introduced me to several cool things like Scala, how Kafka works and how to deploy a Docker…

Implementing Beacon on Apple Watch

Beacon — a Summit feature that allows athletes to send a live update of their location to safety contacts. Back in late April, I started implementing Beacon on the Apple Watch. Aside from UI work, adding Beacon support to our Watch app consisted of two parts. The first part was…

Android Launch Performance

As an athlete, two ways to improve performance are building strength or improving efficiency. If you train consistently, you start to see improvements. The path to improving software performance has some similarities like how you might see steady improvements over time, only to reach a temporary plateau before breaking through…