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.

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