Engineering Blog

Posts for April 2011

Gotta Bounce... to an Engineering Offsite

Here in Yelp Engineering, we spend lots of time working on useful and cool stuff for Yelp users of all sorts—consumers, business owners, and even our own Community Managers. Sometimes though, it’s nice to take a break and go hang out with your coworkers for a bit. What better place to “hang out” than a few feet up in the air? Our most recent offsite took us to House of Air, a giant indoor trampoline park. After getting a brief safety introduction from HoA’s “Flight Crew” the team hit the trampolines, and well… I think these say it all: Of...

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Parcelgen: A Code Generator for Android Data Objects

When I switched from working on Yelp’s iPhone app to our Android app, one of the first things I encountered was the radical difference between the equivalent classes to handle what I normally consider a “screen” or “page” of an app. On Android, an Activity handles what on iOS you use a UIViewController for, but they work in fundamentally different ways. One of the biggest differences is that on Android you can’t just instantiate a new Activity and display it like you can with a UIViewController. Instead you create an Intent and tell the system to start an Activity based...

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