The Challenge The inaugural Yelp Dataset Challenge opened in March 2013 with the release of our latest academic dataset featuring reviews and businesses from the greater Phoenix metro area. The goal of the dataset was to encourage development of new techniques in data analysis and machine learning while providing the academic community with a rich dataset over which to train their models. Students who submitted their research related to the dataset were eligible for a cash reward and further incentives for publishing and presenting their findings. The Winners of the First Yelp Dataset Challenge The challenge was viewed by many...

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So you want to be part of the Yelp engineering team, but you just wish you didn’t have to commute all the way up the peninsula to San Francisco? Gosh, if only there were a way…hold on a minute, now there is! Yes, we have read your mind and are pretty psyched to announce the opening of a Yelp office in Palo Alto! Bonus: it’s conveniently located mere blocks from the Caltrain station at California Avenue and in the midst of tons of local businesses and lunch spots. As part of the Palo Alto team, your mission, should you choose...

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Up today is another learning group! For those new to the concept, Yelp’s learning group happens every Friday: we serve lunch and listen to a tech talk about something cool, from learning a new language to strategies in Starcraft.  Last month we had an excellent talk by Cameron P., a web developer here at Yelp, on HTML5 Canvas.  He covered how to speed up 2D rendering in browsers and demoed his personal project “ Literally Canvas,” a WYSIWYG drawing widget you can embed on any web page. With HTML5’s Canvas, you can create: graphs, animations, games, image compositions, and more....

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We’re super excited to have three events happening at Yelp this month. The SF Java User Group returns to Yelp with a presentation on “The Eschatology of Java.” Abdelmonaim Remani, a platform architect at just.me answers the question “What is the future of Java?” by analyzing how different forces, such as mobile and the growth of functional languages, will affect the Java ecosystem.  Abdelmonaim promises an “emotionally-charged” session, so fuel up with drinks and pizza and get ready to geek out! For the designers and product folks reading, we have a talk for you on “The Real Me,” happening on...

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Mark W. and Chris C. are part of the team behind our recently launched Wordmap, and today they give us a peek behind the scenes. Read on to learn how we’re helping people with a critical need: avoiding hipsters (oh yea, and connecting with great local businesses!) We have a lot of data here at Yelp, and we’re always thinking about cool new ways to explore it. One recent example is the Wordmap, a visualization of geographical patterns of word usage in Yelp reviews across a city. We’ll step through how we built this feature: how we transformed our review data...

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Something that we value at Yelp is keeping things new and exciting. A few days ago, we were able to host a brand new meetup group, the San Francisco Django Meetup Group! They launched their summer speaker series by inviting Randall Degges to discuss how he grew his Python API company using Tastypie, Django, Flask and Amazon’s DynamoDB. He touched on the trade-offs of these technologies from a business perspective and, along the way, told some fun stories from his own company. One of the techniques he advocates is service-oriented architecture (SOA), something that we here at Yelp have been...

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Machine Learning (ML) plays a critical role here at Yelp. It allows us to transform Big Data into usable information. A major area of research in ML is understanding how to apply the myriad of techniques available to an engineer. In addition to deciding on which algorithm to use, a practitioner must decide how to verify models, distribute computation, and monitor performance. Best practices exist in each of these areas, but novices may not be aware of them, and they can be tedious, even for experts. We know that many problems in computer science can be solved with another layer...

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Ever been woken up at 3am by a misbehaving database query?   Jenni S., Yelp’s MySQL DBA, walks us through Yelp’s system to prevent such rude awakenings. Here at Yelp, we push multiple times a day.  We do this safely and surely with our process of code review, integration,   automated testing, and extensive monitoring.  I think that we’re all used to the idea of automated testing for our code, but what about the queries generated by the application against the database? Catch potential problem queries in testing, not production In most engineering organizations, it’s common for the development, build,...

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