As you may have seen on our Yelp Official Blog, we recently did a post on a new feature we are testing: Yelpy Insights. Here on the Engineering and Product Blog, we wanted to dive into the work our engineering team did to help discover and display Yelpy Insights. The Idea: Yelpy Insights was actually borne from feedback we had received from vegetarian yelpers (and in fact, some members of the engineering team!) that finding a good place to eat vegetarian food was tricky. For example, some things that are liked by vegetarians are also liked by omnivores, but some...

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Meet Julien R., Yelp systems engineer extraordinaire! When he isn’t keeping San Francisco green by biking to work or brewing his own beer at home, this well-rounded engineer keeps Yelp running day and night. So, totally not multi-talented at all. Julien recently took some time to share his favorite stories during his three plus years at Yelp. Check it out! What did you do before coming to Yelp? I studied electrical engineering at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. During one of my summer vacations, I did an internship for a small network engineering company and got my CCNA. Once out of...

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It’s that time of year again: when Yelp engineers huddle for 48 hours to dream up and build some trippy stuff – and Yelp Hack@thon 7 proved no different! There was everything from custom Magic: The Gathering cards personalized for Yelp, our own version of Hungry, Hungry Hippos with (you guessed it) Hungry, Hungry Yelpers made in HTML5 to LOLPython on Monorails that featured LOLcode instead of Python (with some funny web framework to go along with it!). That Magic: The Gathering card look familiar, Jeremy?   In past years, we’ve provided a deeper look into some of the projects...

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If you could have any superpower, what would it be? (You can’t say the power to get more powers.) If you’re like me, it’d be the power to fly. Unfortunately, I’m not a Superman, Neo, nor a bird. I’m a software engineer at Yelp; I make things happen by writing code. So I started to write code that tricks me into feeling like I’m flying. What I ended up with was a Mac app that allows you to control a quadcopter by flapping your arms like wings. To do this I used the Microsoft Kinect, a Parrot ARDrone quadcopter, OpenNI,...

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