February is going to be an exciting month! We’re looking forward to hosting our third Girl Geek Dinner next week which will feature talks from Yelp engineers on topics like learning, system performance metrics, and service monitoring. We’ll be present at the WSDM Conference that focuses on data mining and search, and at the Lesbians Who Tech Summit in San Francisco. If you’re in the area, swing by to say hi! We’ll be the ones giving away the infamous Yelp mints. This month we’ll also be hosting SF Python, Designers + Geeks, and Products that Count in the office. At...

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In case you missed it last month, we open sourced PaaSTA, our platform-as-a-service which received a lot of excitement and support from the community. We want to bring our friends together to learn more, so we’re hosting our last Yelp Tech Talk of the year in conjunction with Mesosphere on December 17th, featuring PaaSTA + Mesos! Our lead engineer on PaaSTA, Kyle Anderson, will introduce the platform and speak to how it uses Mesos to power our SOA architecture while Sunil Shah, from Mesosphere, will speak on Mesosphere’s DCOS and how it enables PaaS tools like PaaSTA to exist. We’ll...

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Last month a group of Yelp engineers attended the Grace Hopper Conference in Houston. We had a great time presenting on crucial conversations and talking to amazing women at our after party. To keep the momentum going through the holiday season, we’re ramping up to launch our 18th internal hackathon at the beginning of this month! On November 7th, we’re excited to be partnering with Next.ML to bring machine learning workshops and panels to Yelp HQ. We’ll be hearing from leaders in the industry on a number of topics and will contribute to the presentations by sharing some of the...

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In two weeks we’ll be attending Grace Hopper for the third time in a row and we’re really excited to support Susanne L., Wei W., and Jen W. as they present about “Crucial Conversations in Your Career.” Our team learned a lot last year and we look forward to sharing more lessons with you again after we get back! If you’re attending the conference, be sure to swing by our booth (121). You might be a few of the lucky attendees to score a ticket to our after party! We’re also happy to announce that later this month, we’ll be...

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Most of July was spent ramping up for our internal hackathon so it was a little slower for us. Last month, we hosted a small PyLadies workshop and celebrated the Designers + Geeks 4 year anniversary (2.5 years of which have been hosted at Yelp!). We also had Tera- Nicholle Nelson, the VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal and Under Armour, stop by our office to discuss how to “disrupt” yourself. Since hackathon recently wrapped up, we’re slowly recovering from dinosaurs, hacking, and our food comas (look out for our official hackathon post coming out soon!). Coming up this month, we’ve...

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WWDC is coming up soon and it’s going to be a blast! We’ve got our Apple Watch (with our lovely Yelp App installed, of course!) and are ready to party. To celebrate, we’re hosting our third annual WWDC party on June 8 and raffling off an Apple Watch (so you can use our app too)! While you’re in town for WWDC, make sure to catch some of the other great meetups we’ve got lined up. We’ll also be speaking at a Women in Tech event at Alpine Labs and at a DBA Happy Hour co-hosted with Box! We’re also really...

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Last week we held our second tech talk, focusing on mobile, in a new internal series we launched this year. The presenters covered two very important topics in mobile: wearable apps and testing. Building Our Apple Watch App The evening started with a talk by Bill M. who lead the efforts to build our Apple Watch app. We knew we had to build the app in order to provide our users with the best possible access and experience. Since the platform was brand new and kept changing, it came with its own challenges. Development needed to be planned carefully to...

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This month we’re ramping up and preparing for an awesome time at PyCon. We’ll be there in full force next month so look for us there at booth 606! Be sure to catch a presentation by our own Soups R. on Friday, April 10 at 12:10 where he’ll be speaking on Data Science in Advertising: Or a future when we love ads. In the meantime, hopefully you aren’t too sleepy from daylight savings time to attend some great events this month: Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - 6:00PM - Tech talks and PyCon Startup Row Pitches (SF Python) Thursday, March 19,...

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The Northeast may be covered in snow, but here in sunny San Francisco, we’re operating at full steam! We got the year off to a great start with a few meetups and the launch of our new tech talk series (more on that later). This month, on top of the meetups we’re hosting, we’re also getting involved with GirlDevWeek. We’ll be hosting a panel here at Yelp HQ, as well as throwing the official after party in conjunction with Pandora. So if you’re going to be at GirlDevWeek, we hope to see you at both events! Meetups at Yelp HQ:...

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While we’re all still recovering from our Thanksgiving-induced food comas, we wanted to share some of our upcoming events for December! This Thursday, some of our engineers will be giving lightning talks at the Women Who Code meetup so make sure to come! We’re also very excited to be sponsoring the Women Who Code Holiday Party in Waterloo Ontario on December 11th. If you’re in the area, RSVP and stop by! For the rest of the week (through December 5th), Yelp will also be matching donations to Women Who Code (up to $5,000 total). Please consider donating and helping them...

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This month we have a handful of exciting events and a few new ones! We kicked off the month with Hackathon 15.0 where Yelpers created and shared some amazing projects (more on that in a few weeks!). Now that the hackathon dust has settled, we’re starting off by hosting the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner to help encourage networking between girl geeks. On top of that, we’ll be at AnDevCon November 18 - 21 so make sure to find us there too. Events happening at Yelp HQ: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - 5:30PM - Yelp Girl Geek Dinner ( Bay...

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Welcome back! Today we have Wei, Rachel, Jen, Virginia and Anusha sharing their experiences. Wei is an engineer on the consumer team and she brings amazing user experiences to our customers. Rachel and Jen are both engineers on our international team, bringing the power of Yelp to all of our international communities. Virginia works as an engineer on our partnerships team and Anusha is an engineer on our infrastructure team. Overall, we all had a blast getting to know each other, meeting other amazing women in the industry, hearing some great stories from inspiring women role models, and sourcing some...

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As you probably heard, Yelp attended Grace Hopper this year. Nine software engineers from different teams attended and, for many of us, it was our first time. It was a unique experience to see so many talented women in one place. In addition to the talks and panel discussions, we also had the opportunity and pleasure to represent Yelp at the career fair. It was amazing to see a consistent flow of students and industry talent, all happy customers, stop by our booth to speak with us and tell us their stories of using Yelp. We had such a great...

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October will be a busy month for all of us, with a lot of great conferences and events happening back-to-back. We start the month off with an SF Python meetup in collaboration with PyLadies. Zach Musgrave will be presenting on performance profiling in production. Later this month, Scott Clark will be presenting on MOE for SF Machine Learning here at Yelp HQ too! If you’re not familiar with MOE, it’s our black box optimization engine to help you with real world metric optimization. We’ll also be at Grace Hopper on October 8-10, StrataConf on October 15-17, and at HTML5DevConf on...

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Yelp is happy to announce that we’re headed to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in October! Admiral Grace Hopper was a pioneer in computer science. She was a driving force behind the development of English-based programming languages and an inspiring example of how intelligence and perseverance can overcome technical and cultural adversity. The Grace Hopper conference, presented by the Anita Borg Institute and ACM, is the largest gathering of women in computing in the world. Its mission to “connect, inspire, and guide women in computing and organizations that view technology innovation as a strategic imperative” is...

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We’re happy to announce that we are one of the first official sponsors of Women Who Code! WWCode is an organization whose goal is to help women excel in technology careers. WWCode and Yelp started working together three years ago when the meetup group was created. We’ve hosted many of their events ranging from Ruby workshops to discussion panels including CEOs and CTOs. Since their launch, WWCode has grown to 14,000 members across 14 countries worldwide. By sponsoring their new non-profit (as of this July!), we’re excited and happy to help them achieve their goals of expanding into 50 cities...

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We’ve got a busy month ahead of us with several great events being held at Yelp HQ. We hope everyone was able to catch our security team over at BSides LV this past week where one of our engineers, Ioannis, presented on honeypots and ran a workshop teaching people how to set up one of their own. From panel discussions to hands-on workshops on everything from fashionable tech to Android development and growth hacking, there’s plenty to keep you busy at Yelp HQ. We’ve got six great events this month, and spaces are going fast. Make sure to sign up...

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People say that security is hard and that’s exactly why we have a dedicated security team here at Yelp! We place tremendous importance on securing our environment, our employees and the millions of visitors who trust Yelp every month. Information Security is not a solo endeavor. You have to exchange information with fellow security engineers and researchers, get informed of new vulnerabilities and threats and build a “web of trust” containing security practitioners that you can count on. “Community” is the keyword in this case. This is why we are officially sponsoring Security BSides Las Vegas 2014! BSides is a...

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