Encouraging positivity has been a central pillar to Yelp’s culture from the beginning. If a teammate rolls out a huge feature, helps you out in a bind, or just makes a funny joke, we believe you should be able to show them a small token of appreciation. That’s why we developed an internal tool called Yelp Love, a web application for sending notes of appreciation (aka love) to your coworkers within Yelp. Yelp Love started as a Hackathon effort back in 2013. Over the course of two hackathons, we rolled out Yelp Love to the entire company. Since its deployment,...

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In 2014, Yelp launched pre-commit, a framework for managing pre-commit hooks. Since then, the community has contributed many different hooks to help with development in a wide variety of languages, including Python, Ruby, Go, Node.js, and Clojure. You can see a list of many of these here. Pre-commit has been invaluable in increasing the productivity of Yelp’s code base and code-reviews by making style issues a thing of the past and allowing us to easily check for broken and deprecated code usage with a variety of code linters. While pre-commit supports a number of popular languages, the goal of pre-commit...

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Yelp Dataset Challenge Round 7 Winners The seventh round of the Yelp Dataset Challenge ran throughout the first half of 2016 and, as usual, we were impressed with the projects and ideas that came out of the challenge. Today, we are proud to announce the grand prize winner of the $5,000 award: “Semantic Scan: Detecting Subtle, Spatially Localized Events in Text Streams” by Abhinav Maurya, Kenton Murray, Yandong Liu, Chris Dyer, William W. Cohen, and Daniel B. Neill (from Carnegie Mellon University, University of Notre Dame in Indiana). The authors created a model to detect and characterize emerging topics in...

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Alexa H. has been a Product Designer at Yelp for two years, having previously graduated from California College of the Arts studying Graphic Design. This year at Grace Hopper, she co-presented “Ask questions, lots of questions: A workshop for practicing building beautiful presentations in Google Slides and giving design critique.” It was her first public speaking experience, and after watching her fantastic performance, I wanted to know more! Jenni: So Alexa, I’ll just dive right in: how did you feel about the prospect of public speaking before you submitted this proposal? Had you considered it in the past? Alexa: Well,...

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One hundred days ago we launched Yelp’s public bug bounty program on HackerOne. Since launching the program, we received over 564 reports from 512 reporters. The distribution of the reports was as follows: Resolved: ~ 7% Informative: ~ 36% Duplicate: ~ 31% Not Applicable: ~ 26% Looking back on the first 100 days of our program, we fixed 39 vulnerabilities and paid out $13,850 in rewards. We maintained less than 24 hours response time and less than 1 month resolution time. The distribution of bug-bounty payouts over time is shown in Chart 1. Chart 1: Distribution of bug-bounty payouts over...

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Yelp users upload around 100,000 photos a day to a collection of tens of millions, and that rate continues to grow. In fact, we’re seeing a growth rate for photos that is outpacing the rate of reviews. These photos provide a rich tapestry of information about the content and quality of local businesses. One important aspect of photos is the type of content being displayed. In August of 2015 we introduced a system that classified restaurant photos as food, drink, outside, inside, or menu. Since then, we have trained and put into production similar systems for coffee shops and bars,...

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For the past few months we’ve been spreading the word about our shiny new Data Pipeline: a Python-based tool that streams and transforms real-time data to services that need it. We wrote a series of blog posts covering how we replicate messages from our MySQL tables, how we track schemas and compute schema migrations, and finally how we connect our data to different types of data targets like Redshift and Salesforce. With all of this talk about the Data Pipeline, you might think that we here at Yelp are like a kid with a new toy, wanting to keep it...

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Ah - politics. It’s frustrating, it’s funny, it’s serious business. It is perhaps one of the best windows we have into the nature of the human condition. So we think it’s fitting that we combine politics with another window into human nature - search data. In particular, Yelp’s PR team was interested in looking at how the Republican and Democratic National Conventions affected what people looked for on Yelp. Could we confirm certain political stereotypes? Would there be surprises? Methodology From a data analysis perspective, we first need to precisely state the question before we can get to tackling it....

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