I considered writing this as a clickbaity listicle: “7 secrets of engineering team management - you won’t believe number three!” Unfortunately that’s impossible, because it’s a much harder topic, and anyway, number three is: “many years of ongoing investment in building the right team culture, making a lot of mistakes, and learning from them.” Less catchy, but much more what this series is going to try and cover… I’ve been at Yelp for eight years now, and I’ve been leading engineering teams for almost 25 years in both the UK and the US, at a wide variety of companies, at...

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In addition to helping people find great places to eat, Yelp connects people with great local professionals to help them accomplish tasks like making their next big move, fixing that leaky faucet, or repairing a broken phone screen. Instead of spending time calling several businesses, users can utilize Yelp’s Request a Quote feature to reach out to several businesses at once, receive cost estimates from those businesses, and ultimately hire the right local professional for the job. This post focuses on how Yelp’s Data Pipeline is used to efficiently compute which businesses are eligible for the feature, and also introduces...

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As various teams at Yelp were focused on developing features to help businesses adapt to COVID-19, some teams were looking ahead and developing features that would help businesses in the later stages or after the pandemic. The Challenge Early on in the pandemic, we saw some businesses pause advertising on Yelp as government regulations required many businesses temporarily close or limit their operations. However, businesses quickly adjusted to the local regulations, while implementing health and safety precautions to keep their staff and customers safe. Through this adjustment we wanted to ensure it was easy to restart advertising right where they...

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Everyone loves graphs going up and to the right, unless they reflect your page load timings. This blog post is about curtailing higher page load times. Yelp for Business Owners allows business owners to manage their listing, respond to reviews, edit their business information, upload business photos, and more. Business owners can also purchase Yelp Ads and profile products to target local audiences and enhance their business’s presence on Yelp. In this blog post, you’ll learn about the ways we improved the UX performance of our ads purchase flow by dramatically reducing the load times. You’ll be able to apply...

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Improving Code Ownership at Yelp In this prior blog post, Kent talked about how the Engineering Effectiveness (EE) organization was created at Yelp to reduce communication complexity between core teams and product teams. Core teams need to communicate infrastructure changes, manage the deprecation of libraries and tools, and evangelize new tooling to other teams at a regular cadence. EE has been investing in building tools that can communicate these changes and provide insights into what might make product teams more effective in shipping code quickly and safely. In order to measure the engineering effectiveness of Yelp, we need to measure...

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Many machine learning (ML) practitioners use partial dependence plots (PDP) to gain insights into model behaviors. But have you run into situations where PDPs average two groups with different behaviors and produce curves applicable to none? Are you longing for tools that help you understand detailed model behavior in a visually manageable way? Look no further! We are thrilled to share with you our newest model interpretation tools: the Nearby Individual Conditional Expectation plot and its companion, the Partial Dependence at Quantiles plot. They highlight local behaviors and hint at how much we may trust such readings. A not NICE...

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This post is about how Yelp is transitioning from the management of Cassandra clusters in EC2 to orchestrating the same clusters in production on Kubernetes. We will start by discussing the EC2-based deployment we have used for the past few years, followed by an introduction to the Cassandra operator, its responsibilities, the core reconciliation workflow of the operator, and finally, the etcd locking we employ for cross-region coordination. Cassandra is a distributed wide-column NoSQL datastore and is used at Yelp for both primary and derived data. Yelp’s infrastructure for Cassandra has been deployed on AWS EC2 and ASG (Autoscaling Group)...

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Engineers on Yelp’s Consumer Growth team work closely with product managers, data scientists, and designers to increase user acquisition, engagement and retention to fuel the rest of the business. The team is central to growing the number of active users on the Yelp platform. In-App Update, introduced in Android Pie, is a feature that allows Android users to update the app by showing a prompt while they’re using the app and keeps users in the app as the update is happening in the background. We thought it would be a valuable feature for consumers on Yelp and began researching and...

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