Something that we value at Yelp is keeping things new and exciting. A few days ago, we were able to host a brand new meetup group, the San Francisco Django Meetup Group! They launched their summer speaker series by inviting Randall Degges to discuss how he grew his Python API company using Tastypie, Django, Flask and Amazon’s DynamoDB. He touched on the trade-offs of these technologies from a business perspective and, along the way, told some fun stories from his own company. One of the techniques he advocates is service-oriented architecture (SOA), something that we here at Yelp have been...

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Mark W. and Chris C. are part of the team behind our recently launched Wordmap, and today they give us a peek behind the scenes. Read on to learn how we’re helping people with a critical need: avoiding hipsters (oh yea, and connecting with great local businesses!) We have a lot of data here at Yelp, and we’re always thinking about cool new ways to explore it. One recent example is the Wordmap, a visualization of geographical patterns of word usage in Yelp reviews across a city. We’ll step through how we built this feature: how we transformed our review data...

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