A/B Testing Experiment Frameworks and MOE We recently open sourced MOE, the Metric Optimization Engine, a machine learning tool for solving global, black box optimization problems. An example application for such a system is optimally running online A/B experiments. A/B testing segments the users that come to a site into buckets, or cohorts, and show different versions of the site to different cohorts of users. One can show 50% of users one version of a site (version A) and 50% of users another version of a site (version B). After some amount of time we can see which version of...

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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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At Yelp, we often need to analyze data in real time. Right now most of our data is aggregated and logged using a system called Scribe. This means that real-time processes currently depend on tailing Scribe, reading messages as they are added to the end of the logs. Simply tailing the logs means that any time a tailer is not running, due to maintenance or an unexpected error, it misses all the information logged during that time. We want a more flexible system that allows processes to pick up where they left off, so our analyses account for all of...

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Three times a year the entire engineering team at Yelp gets together and does innovative (sometimes crazy) things like launching a 3D printer into space or flying a quadcopter with human wings…err…arms or figuring out whether Cronuts are more popular than Donuts. We call this tri-annual event…Hackathon! It’s a festival celebrating innovation, creativity, and technical badassery where our smart, talented and witty engineers get 48 hours to work on anything they like. Needless to say, a relentless supply of delicious food also plays a key role in this event. Our hackers showing off their projects in a science fair style...

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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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CSP is Awesome Content Security Policy isn’t new, but it is so powerful that it still feels like the new hotness. The ability to add a header to HTTP responses that tightens user-agent security rules and reports on violations is really powerful. Don’t want to load scripts from third party domain? Set a CSP and don’t.  Trouble with mixed content warnings on your HTTPS domain? Set a CSP and let it warn you when users are seeing mixed content. Realistically, adding new security controls to a website and a codebase as large as Yelp needs to be a gradual process....

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It’s been a busy past few years here at Yelp Engineering. With our 10th anniversary this year and our recent launch in Chile, we think it’s safe to say we’re on to something. But it would be foolish of us to stop here. At the end of the day, we’re engineers: we live for the fact that there are still so many challenging problems to solve, features to improve, and datasets to explore. With the size of the projects we’re tackling nowadays, our Engineering and Product Management teams need to be in constant contact to coordinate development, testing, and release....

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