Want to know what widows, rivers, and pig bristles have to do with typography?  Listen to Carolina de Bartolo ( @carodebartolo) explain why Typography Matters in the video below!   Designers + Geeks is an engaging meetup that covers everything from beautiful architecture to mobile development.  At an event hosted at Yelp in November, Carolina covered topics ranging from the history of typography to practical advice on choosing fonts for your project. Designers + Geeks is just one of the many community events that we host in our spacious 10th floor lounge.  But fair warning: once you attend one event...

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We host several external meetup groups every month, but sometimes, they want us to present, too! SF Hadoop Users invited Sudarshan Gaikaiwair, one of our Yelptastic engineers to speak about mrjob, our MapReduce framework. mrjob is an open source project that runs on top of Hadoop. While mrjob can also be used with your own hadoop cluster, it is great for getting started very quickly with Amazon’s EMR offering. mrjob allows programmers with very little Hadoop or EMR experience to quickly write scripts that can process terabytes of logs on hundreds of machines. This talk covers the basics of MapReduce...

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Our post today is by Will L., an engineering intern on one of Yelp’s backend teams this past fall. Will walks us through the challenges of bringing restaurant health inspection scores to Yelp, a feature we announced today at the United States Conference of Mayors in Washington, DC. As you may have seen on our official blog, we are very excited about our initial release of the Local Inspection Value-Entry Specification (LIVES). LIVES is an open data standard crafted by Yelp in partnership with the cities of San Francisco and New York to allow municipalities to publish restaurant health inspection...

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Last year we published an article explaining the reasoning behind the birth of our mobile site, Mission: Mobile Makeover. Since then, we’ve been hard at work, dedicated to improving this new Yelp property and transform it into an app-like experience. Ideally? Forget about your browser, and keep on Yelpin’! Today, we’ll focus on some of the work we’ve accomplished during the past year or so. We’ll talk about two technical challenges faced lately: how to boost interaction speed on mobile, and how to make the most out of the screen sitting in your pocket. Boosting Interaction Speed Clicks are a...

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