Yelp Product & Engineering Blog

What the Engineers-in-Training Work on at Yelp

This summer, we were fortunate to have 7 awesome interns join us for a 12-week internship at Yelp HQ. Coming from elite schools across the nation, these interns weren’t fetching us coffee or making copies. They were working side by side with our best and brightest on some of the most important and critical pieces of Yelp’s business. We had them coding away on everything from search infrastructure to user visible features. We couldn’t be prouder of the work they did and now we’d like to share their accomplishments with you!

Yelp Makes Beer More Fun

Here at Yelp, we enjoy a good brew. We also love our jobs as engineers! So for our recent Hackathon, it made perfect sense to build something that made drinking beer more...interactive. We call it KegMate.

Being that you've found yourself on our Engineering blog, I bet you're interested in how it works, eh?

Yelp Engineers Discover Blogging

For six years we've been hammering away on this little website of ours, feeding the needs of a steadily growing user-base with awesome features, freaky-good SEO and an elegant, performant architecture. What started out as a couple of guys in a room together is now nearly forty engineers developing a diverse set of systems that serve over 35 million unique visitors per month. We've come a long way in that time and covered a lot of ground — but our source control log still has blame lines from PayPal co-founder and initial Yelp investor Max Levchin, so it'd be hard to forget our roots.

And our roots are a common story here in Silicon Valley. Yelp is steeped in free and open-source technologies — packages like Apache, Python, MySQL, Memcached, Lucene and countless others are the nuts and bolts that keep our site serving up more and more local content every day. There is an extremely valuable tradition in this industry of sharing the fruits of our labor with our fellow engineers, and today Yelp Engineering joins the fray. We're gonna use this space to show off some of the neat stuff we work on and to try and teach some of the hard-learned lessons we've gleaned from our journey. We've also got a few open-source software projects to release along the way.

We are Yelp Engineering, and we like writing code, crunching numbers, drinking beer, and long walks on the beach.