2014 was a busy year for us at Yelp Engineering and with 2015 having just kicked off, we wanted to highlight some of our most exciting events from last year.

Open Source

Yelp loves open source. We love contributing back to the developer and open source communities and last year was no exception to that. We saw a large number of our engineers contributing to many different projects. In July, to help organize all of the projects we worked on, we launched a new open source site along with the revamped developer site.

Over the course of the year, we open sourced 16 new projects, and saw 3,000 commits across the 48 projects we have on GitHub. Some of the biggest projects we released, including MOE ( source), dockersh ( source), pre-commit ( source), and pyleus ( source), saw a lot of excitement from the developer community and we’re very happy to have open sourced them!

The Community

Yelp Engineers at Grace Hopper

We partner a lot with the developer community to give people and groups ample opportunities to to learn, interact, and share knowledge with each other. Throughout the year, our engineers attended 15 different conferences, like LAUNCH Scale and Grace Hopper. At LAUNCH Scale, VP of Engineering Michael Stoppelman shared a little bit about how we’ve scaled traffic at Yelp, discussing some of the changes we made to our infrastructure to handle the increased traffic over time. Our engineers returning from Grace Hopper were excited to share some of their experiences and feedback from the conference, hoping to help more women enter the tech industry.

We hosted 70 meetups at Yelp HQ from different groups like SF Python, Designers and Geeks, SF Machine Learning, Docker, and Women Who Code. They brought with them many great speakers such as author Nir Eyal who spoke on how to build habit forming products and Python core developer Raymond Hettinger who taught us about high performance Python.

One of the things we’re very proud of is our partnership with Women Who Code, which, in September, grew even stronger when we became one of the first official sponsors, helping them achieve their goal of connecting 1 million women in tech.

Hackathon

Three times a year, all the engineers at Yelp gather for two days of hacking, food, and fun. We put together some Yelpy puzzles, flew remote-controlled sharks, and designed our own henna tattoos. Last year, our engineers participated in three separate hackathons where we saw a total of 221 projects between the three.

On to 2015!

There’s already a lot of fun and exciting things planned for 2015 so if you want to be part of the fun follow us on Twitter and Facebook to catch all the announcements!

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